According to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, “Every two days
now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up
until 2003.” Much of today’s IT conversation revolves around how organizations
can use Big Data analytics to leverage this rapid growth of information assets.
But as the desire to extract value from this data continues to increase and
technological advancements improve our ability to exploit Big Data, privacy
risks are also on the rise.
For organizations looking to introduce an efficient privacy practice
and embed it directly into the technology, Ontario’s Information and Privacy
Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, has a solution. She calls it
Privacy by Design—a system built to
address privacy concerns in the core of the solution.
“When you embed privacy protective practices directly into
technology itself, then you mitigate the opportunities for privacy risks to
arise and you, in effect, prevent the privacy harm from arising,” Dr.
Cavoukian said in a recent interview with IT in Canada. “It's very much a
pro-active, preventative model.”
Big data and the
privacy challenge
In her recent report,
Privacy
by Design in the Age of Big Data, Cavoukian called Big Data a
“game-changer” on the privacy front. She stressed the importance of considering
privacy implications at the earliest stages of technology development. The end goal
is for organizations to be able to respond to risks and opportunities in real
time—a task that has been complicated by the sheer volume of data that is now accumulating.
