Big Data and the Future For Privacy

Neil M. Richards
Jonathan H. King

Abstract
In our inevitable big data future, critics and skeptics argue that
privacy will have no place. We disagree. When properly
understood, privacy rules will be an essential and valuable part of
our digital future, especially if we wish to retain the human values
on which our political, social, and economic institutions have been
built. In this paper, we make three simple points. First, we need to
think differently about “privacy.” Privacy is not merely about
keeping secrets, but about the rules we use to regulate
information, which is and always has been in intermediate states
between totally secret and known to all. Privacy rules are
information rules, and in an information society, information
rules are inevitable. Second, human values rather than privacy
for privacy’s sake should animate our information rules. These
must include protections for identity, equality, security, and trust.
Third, we argue that privacy in our big data future can and must
be secured in a variety of ways. Formal legal regulation will be
necessary, but so too will “soft” regulation by entities like the
Federal Trade Commission, and by the development of richer
notions of big data ethics.

Word Count: 7,718 words, incl. footnotes

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 1

Big Data and the Future For Privacy

Neil M. Richards*
Jonathan H. King**

Big data is our future, but what place will privacy have in
that future? Many technologists and futurists predict a digital
future in which privacy has no place (Barnett, 2010; Ferenstein,
2013). Others argue that the benefits of open data and data science
mean that certain kinds of privacy rules (like limitations on
collection or deletion requirements) make privacy either an obstacle
to progress or something highly impractical to enforce in our
ubiquitous digital future (Mundie, 2014; Toobin, 2014). Data
scientists consider privacy to be an obstacle to the kind of
innovative work they want to do, while the leading manuals for data
warehouse engineers largely ignore considerations of privacy
altogether (Birnhack et al., 2015). At the level of theory, then,
privacy is an anachronism hostile to progress, while at the level of
practice, it is just impractical and gets in the way of doing things.
Such accounts are common, but their dismissal of privacy as
a foolish anachronism is belied by both common sense and a small
but growing scholarly and public literature about the importance of
privacy for the kind of sustainable, humanist society we should
want to build. In this paper, we attempt to lay out some of the legal
and ethical principles we should build into that future society.

* Professor of Law, Washington University.

** Visiting Scholar, Washington University; Head of Cloud Strategy for Ericsson.

The views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily the views of his
employer. For helpful comments and perspective we would like to thank Lucas Carlson,
Andrew Clyne, Andrew Higginbotham, Woody Buckner, Jason Hoffman, Brian Hughes,
Matthew Johnson, Gavin McMurdo, Alex Williams and Jared Wray. We would also like to
thank Ujjayini Bose, Matthew Cin, and Carolina Foglia for their very helpful research
assistance.

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 2 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

Our claim is that the shiny future asserted as inevitable by

the pro-innovation anti-privacy rhetoric turns out to be both
shallow and unappealing on closer analysis. We believe there is an
alternative future where we can have the benefits of data science
while at the same time preserving meaningful legal and ethical
protections for data subjects. We are not alone in this view. Over
the past decade, scholars and commentators writing in fields as
diverse as law, economics, sociology, and even computer science
have argued that our digital future must include meaningful
protections for values that we care deeply about such as privacy,
equality and identity. Moreover, there is good evidence not only
that privacy can be a market differentiator for businesses in the
digital economy, but also that security and data integrity are
essential for any entity that handles personal data (Tysiac, 2015).
Similarly, we suggest that the digital future we are building is not
inevitable – whether and how much it protects privacy and security
are dependent upon many individual decisions by regulators,
businesses, engineers, and users. Our digital future is not ordained
to take a single, shiny, privacy-denying form. Instead, it will be a
human creation. As such it must include the human values we have
come to cherish – values which are advanced by privacy rules. In
this chapter we lay out a vision for the role that privacy can and
should play in protecting values in this digital future.
Our argument develops in three simple steps. In Part I, we
show how the traditional way of thinking about privacy as secret,
unobserved information is incomplete. We argue instead that the
best way to think about the control of digital information is not by
reference to secrecy, but by thinking of privacy rules as information
rules. This has close analogues to the long European scholarly and
regulatory tradition of Data Protection. Privacy regulation, in our
view, however, is not an end in itself but rather a means to other,
more important ends. Thinking about privacy in this way reveals
that privacy rules of some sort are inevitable, that information is
usually in some intermediate state between wholly private and
wholly public, and that existing legal privacy tools like data

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 3

protection and confidentiality have an essential part to play in our

digital future. In Part II, we illustrate the values that privacy rules
should protect. We identify four of these values as particularly
salient at the present time: identity, equality, security and trust.
And in Part III, mindful of the complexity of our digital society, we
suggest how meaningful privacy protection can be achieved in a big
data future, through a combination of traditional regulation, “soft”
regulation, and the development of big data ethics.
We have long had technology futurists, and in many respects
they have done their job. We propose now that privacy futurists
should join the debate in earnest. We hope that our cross-
disciplinary examination of a digital future for privacy will help
stimulate this discussion, with the goal of helping to build a digital
future in which humans as well as data will want to live and thrive.

I. HOW TO THINK ABOUT PRIVACY

For a concept that has taken on such importance in our
modern, digital society, “privacy” is notoriously slippery and hard
to define. Even the leading academic treatments of privacy are
reluctant to define it, given its many different usages. Legal scholar
Daniel Solove, for example, focuses on “privacy problems” rather
than on defining privacy, and takes an observational approach,
cataloguing “four general types of privacy problems with sixteen
different subgroups” (Solove, 2008). Other legal scholars focus on
defining privacy harms in ways that the law can understand and
remedy (Calo, 2011); such efforts hearken back to privacy law’s
origins in tort law, a body of law that by definition remedies civil
wrongs to identifiable plaintiffs. Other disciplines take different
approaches, but have similarly failed to announce a definition of
privacy that can be good for all seasons, or all uses. Information
studies scholar Helen Nissenbaum, for example, focuses less on
defining privacy than on identifying when a privacy violation is
subjectively experienced, by urging us to think about privacy as the

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 4 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

management of information flows in their social and technological

contexts (Nissenbaum, 2010).
For better or for worse, “privacy” is the word that Western
legal systems have settled on using to deal with problems related to
the flows of personal data. This is particularly true in the United
States, where the European concept of “data protection” is not a
meaningful part of popular discussions about personal data
(Richards, 2006). Many American understandings of privacy
conceive of it as a secret, under which things that are not known are
“private,” but things that are shared lose that protection (Solove,
2004). This idea is illustrated perhaps most infamously by Fourth
Amendment law’s “third party doctrine,” under which criminal
defendants who share information with third parties can lose a
“reasonable expectation of privacy” in that information (Smith v.
Maryland, 1979). And in the big data context, this question has
taken on added importance with many leading voices (including
ostensible privacy advocates) arguing that because the collection of
vast amounts of human data is inevitable, the law should abandon
regulating the collection of information and instead focus only on
its use (Cate et al., 2013; Mundie, 2014; World Economic Forum,
2013).
In this Part, we want to suggest a different way of thinking
about privacy, or at least a different way of thinking about the
protection of personal information across distributed digital
networks and databases. We will argue that most information
exists and has always existed in intermediate states between
“public” and “private,” and that such information should not lose
and often has not lost legal protection in such intermediate states.
We should think less about whether information is “private” in a
metaphysical sense, and more about what sorts of rules should
govern our intermediate data, because privacy rules, at bottom are
just information rules. In an information society, sustainable
information rules of some sort and by some name are inevitable.

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 5

A. Information in Intermediate States

Let’s start with the idea that privacy is really about secrecy,
and that information that is shared ceases to be private. Several
good reasons suggest that this is a bad way to understand privacy.
First, the idea is problematic even at the level of ordinary verbal
usage. If I know something about myself that no one else knows,
we might call this a “secret.” But if I tell you my secret, the idea
doesn’t stop being a secret. Odds are that if I am telling you a
secret, then there is some kind of informal or formal trust
relationship between us. In the government context, secrets and
“top secrets” can be known by many people. But even these secrets
are protected by a wide variety of legal, technological and
operational tools, including criminal and contract law, encryption
and other security tools, and the whole trade of spycraft. The same
is true of corporations around the world that utilize confidentiality
regimes, nondisclosure agreements, and trade secret protection to
protect “secret” information.
Our verbal intuitions point up a second observation, which is
that information has always existed in intermediate states between
wholly public and wholly private. Many still think of privacy as a
binary option of “public” or “private,” when our everyday
experiences remind us that virtually all information that matters
exists in intermediate states between these two extremes (Richards,
2015). As Woodrow Hartzog points out in a forthcoming paper, it
makes just as little sense to define “privacy” or “private
information” in terms of secrets known only to one person as it does
to define “public information” as something that every single
person knows (Hartzog, 2015). In reality, virtually all information
is and has been in intermediate states between these two extreme
poles. Faced with such a reality, we should recognize that our law
should operate primarily in the vast middle, on information in its
intermediate states.
Third, realizing this important fact, our law has in many
cases operated on information in intermediate states for a very long

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 6 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

time. As we argued in a prior paper, even in the big data context,

we must recognize that shared private information can remain
“confidential” (Richards & King, 2014). Much of the confusion
about privacy law over the past few decades has come from the
simplistic idea that privacy is a binary, on-or-off state, and that
once information is shared and consent given, it can no longer be
protected. Binary notions of privacy are particularly dangerous and
can erode trust in our era of Big Data and metadata, in which
private information is necessarily shared to some extent in order to
be useful. The law has always protected private information in
intermediate states, whether through confidentiality rules like the
duties lawyers and doctors owe to clients and patients, evidentiary
rules like the ones protecting marital communications, or statutory
rules like the federal laws protecting health, financial,
communications, and intellectual privacies (Solove & Richards,
2014). Neither shared private data (nor metadata) should forfeit
their ability to be protected merely because they are held in
intermediate states. Understanding that shared private
information can remain confidential better helps us see more
clearly how to align our expectations of privacy with the rapidly
growing secondary uses of big data (Solove & Richards, 2014).

B. Privacy As Information Rules

When we realize that we have been using “privacy” to talk
about information in intermediate states, and that our law has long
regulated information of that sort, we realize that privacy rules are
really information rules. “Privacy,” in this broader sense, becomes
much more than just keeping secrets, and enters the realm of
information governance. We live in an information society, and
privacy rules are the rules that govern the information in and out of
networks and data sets in this society.
Understanding privacy rules as information rules radically
changes the questions we might ask about regulation of personal
information in the big data context. If we think about privacy

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 7

merely as secrets, the collection of data and its incorporation into a

data set would seem to moot any privacy concerns. Information
that is collected and shared even to a moderate degree would seem
to be “public” or at least “non-private,” and therefore beyond any
regulation. Such a conclusion would likely meet with the approval
of many who wield the powerful tools of big data analytics, but it
would leave us with an essentially lawless,anarchic and
unsustainable information society. An information society with no
rules has no protection against hackers, malicious code, data
breaches, revenge porn, child pornography, cybercrime, or any of
our other information age maladies.
But by contrast when we ask the privacy question more
constructively as what rules should govern the collection of
personal information, the question changes entirely, especially
when we recognize that most information has always existed in
intermediate states. The question becomes not about the
metaphysics of “privateness” or “publicness,” but rather about what
kinds of data uses and which kinds of information regulation
support the kind of society we might want to live in and which ones
do not. When we do this, we see that the collection and sharing of
information need not be the end of the regulatory inquiry, but
rather the beginning of it. Unlike much information contained in
databases and read by computers, privacy is not binary. Privacy is
instead an ethical approach to the management of information
flows (Richards & King, 2014). At bottom, then, privacy (and the
decisions we make about it) is ultimately a series of human
questions that must be informed by human values.
But if the decision to protect or regulate the collection, use,
or transfer of personal information is dependent on human values
other than the private-ness or public-ness of a data field, we must
inquire exactly what those values should be. We’ll now take up that
question.
II. PRIVACY’S VALUES

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 8 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

Shifting the privacy inquiry from whether something is

private to what rules should govern the aggregation and use of
personal information begs the question of what values should
govern privacy rules. From this perspective, privacy is not a value
in and of itself. Privacy is instead a tool that can be used to restrict
access to data or to regulate decisions based upon data.
(Analogously, the opposite idea of transparency is also a tool that
can be used to shed light upon unknown activity.) But the decision
about whether or not to impose an information rule, or what sort of
rule to impose, must be made upon the basis of values other than
privacy itself. Under our account, because privacy is such a vague
and notoriously slippery concept, it is not a helpful concept upon
which to base policy decisions.
The values that privacy rules can serve, however, are useful.
In this Part we offer four such values – identity, equality, security
and trust. One can imagine other values that might qualify, but our
purpose here is not to be exhaustive in articulating the many values
that privacy rules can protect. Our purpose instead is to be
illustrative – to sketch out a vision for the kinds of values that
would support the imposition of privacy rules in an age of big data.
Such an approach is not unusual in the law, at least when we are
talking about fundamental human rights or flows of information.
First Amendment law, for example, works in a similar way, in which
the protection for freedom of speech is instrumental, serving a
variety of theories (most notably democratic self-governance and
the search for truth), none of which by themselves adequately
explains either the technical legal doctrine or the cultural reasons
we treat free expression as special (Richards, 2015a). Like privacy
law, free speech law is a regulation of information flows.i We
contend that we should treat privacy the same way.
A. Identity
Privacy rules can protect identity – our ability to determine
for ourselves who we are, what we value, where we go, what we do
and at what times. Big data promises to creates a world of refined

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 9

demographic differentiation – the ability to determine what we like

and what we might want, even if we don’t yet know it ourselves.
The prediction engines of Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, for
example, can recommend to us new books, movies, and music
based upon our existing preferences that can be highly valuable
(Richards & King, 2013).
But such technologies can be used not just to serve existing
preferences, but also to shape them (Richards & King, 2013;
Leonard, 2013). The system of “targeted” and “behavioral”
advertising which support the “free” internet, for example, depend
upon highly granular profiles of our intellectual and political
preferences based upon surveillance of our reading, web-surfing,
associations, and increasingly physical movements (Zuckerman,
2014). Facebook, while apologizing for the reaction over the mood
study it conducted on unknowing users, implemented research
guidelines that while adding thoughtful governance effectively
enshrine their ability to continue such research to package users for
advertisers (Wohlsen, 2014). And each American election cycle
leads to more refined political dossiers on the political identity of
every American voter enabling campaigns to shape elections with
voter micro-targeting, allowing personalized messages to nudge the
political preferences of individual voters (Rubenstein, 2014).
There is a small but growing scholarship in law and other
disciplines suggesting that widespread surveillance affects our
ability to form our identities ourselves. When it comes to
surveillance of intellectual activities, there is good evidence that
surveillance dulls our reading and thinking to the boring, the bland,
and the mainstream (Richards, 2015). Philosopher Timothy
Macklem has argued that “[t]he isolating shield of privacy enables
people to develop and exchange ideas, or to foster and share
activities, that the presence or even awareness of other people
might stifle. For better and for worse, then, privacy is sponsor and
guardian to the creative and subversive” (Macklem, 2008, p. 36).
More generally, legal scholar Julie Cohen has argued compellingly
that privacy shelters our ability to play, to engage in self-

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 10 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

determination, and to manage our boundaries between our social

selves and the world (Cohen, 2013). Privacy of varying sorts –
protection from surveillance or interference – is what enables us to
define our identities. In turn, free identities enable free market
economies and ultimately govern free democracies.
B. Equality
Big data allows knowledge, and knowledge is power. But as
we have argued elsewhere, big data paradoxically has power effects
of its own (Richards & King, 2013). Data science allows firms to
better understand their competitors and customers, and permits
governments greater transparency over the activities of both non-
citizens and citizens. Surveillance of this sort is usually not just to
learn about others, but to learn in order to nudge, influence,
prevent or control (Calo, 2014). At the same time, scholars have
warned about the problem of “unraveling,” in which individuals in a
favored demographic or statistical category can willingly disclose
their favored status, effectively “outing” the remaining silent
members of the class as possessing the disfavored characteristic
(Barocas & Nissenbaum, 2014a, 2014b; Peppet, 2011).
The work of sociologists writing within the field of
surveillance studies is especially helpful in illuminating both the
purposes and the consequences of such surveillance. Over two
decades ago, Oscar Gandy described the “panoptic sort,” in which
databases were being used to profile consumers, sort them into
categories, and then treat those categories differently, giving
different opportunities to each group (Gandy, 1993, p. 15). Gandy
was writing about cutting-edge analytic techniques of the early
1990s, but the intervening decades have produced better tools and
vastly greater data sets with which to sort consumers and citizens.
Subsequent work by David Lyon and other scholars have built on
Gandy’s foundation to show the ways in which analytic tools are
increasingly used to sort citizens and consumers by governments
seeking profiles of criminal risk and companies seeking profiles of
commercial opportunity (Lyon, 2003; Lyon, 2003a; Gilliom, 2006;

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 11

Haggerty & Ericson, 2006). We can see the arrival of Gandy’s

panoptic sort in data broker labels such as “Rural and Barely
Making It”, “Retiring on Empty: Singles” or “Credit Crunched” as
revealed by a 2013 Senate Commerce Committee report on the data
broker industry (Senate Commerce Committee, 2013).
Today we seem to be on the verge of completing the glorious
monster of a “free” Internet paid for by advertising targeted on the
basis of an unprecedented level of surveillance of human lives
(Zuckerman, 2014). And it is data analytics that make the
Internet’s increasingly specific profiling, targeting, and retargeting
possible. There are many possible critiques of our surveillance-
based Internet, but we wish to focus here on its effect on economic
opportunity. Big data analytics permit efficient “sorting,” but the
line between “sorting” and “discrimination” is a blurry and
dangerous one (Gandy, 2010). We might perhaps be comfortable
with certain kinds of economic discrimination; universities and
airlines, for example, have engaged in sophisticated price
discrimination for many years. But big data analytics hold the
promise (or the threat, depending upon one’s perspective) of
perfect price discrimination, in which the surplus of consumer
transactions could potentially be retained entirely by the
sophisticated merchants who wield big data’s tools to calculate the
reserve price of every consumer (Salmon, 2013).
Perhaps even more worryingly, since data analytics rest on
correlations, they can be used intentionally or unintentionally to
discriminate not on the basis of suspect (and illegal) classifications
like race or gender, but on variables or data patterns like residence
or shopping habits that correlate with such demographic traits
(Crawford & Schultz, 2014). Such uses of data science threaten an
end-run around well-established legal principles that forbid
government or private entities from engaging in intentional race,
gender, or other forms of invidious discrimination. At the same
time, the problem of “unraveling” discussed earlier creates
potentially pernicious private incentives and behaviors that
exacerbate the problem of inequality.

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 12 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

Our goal in this paper is not to demonize big data or data

science. Such tools can of course be used to combat discrimination
as well, by looking at hidden patterns of bias and denial of
opportunity (Polonetsky & Wolf, 2014). But this is precisely our
point. Neither the creation of big databases nor the application of
data science to them are neutral acts (Dwork & Mulligan, 2013).
The design and assembly of a database, the application of
algorithmic techniques to that data, and decisions about people
based upon the outputs of those algorithms are human decisions
made by human beings with goals, incentives, and purposes that
can be sharply at odds with the data subjects under analysis. This
was one of the most important findings of the White House Big
Data and Privacy Working Group. In explaining these findings, its
Chair John Podesta explained that:
The detailed personal profiles held about many consumers,
combined with automated, algorithm-driven decision-
making, could lead—intentionally or inadvertently—to
discriminatory outcomes, or what some are already calling
“digital redlining.” The federal government's lead civil rights
and consumer protection agencies should expand their
technical expertise to be able to identify practices and
outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that have a
discriminatory impact on protected classes, and develop a
plan for investigating and resolving violations of law.
(Podesta, 2014)
Privacy rules placed upon big data – including restrictions
on collection, algorithmic transparency and accountability, and
restrictions on the use of analytics to sort and treat people
differently – will be an essential element of the future of privacy law
in a data science world. The imposition of these kinds of
restrictions can ensure that our new analytic tools are not used to
sidestep the possibility of civil and economic equality upon which
our hard-fought existing laws are based. But the important point is
this: without meaningful new procedures and rules protecting

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 13

equality, our commitment to equality risks being undermined by

big data analytics.
C. Security
We have reached a point in our digital society where privacy
cannot exist without security and security cannot exist without
privacy. Ever more prevalent and powerful computing, networking,
and data storage enable the automated and largely costless
collection of data concerning nearly everything we do. To protect
our privacy against this onslaught of collection, we should expect
security and integrity in the systems we use to keep our information
private.
Traditional security measures relied principally upon
establishing a perimeter and preventing intrusion. Like walls and
moats around medieval towns, firewalls, malware detection,
password authentication and other tools focused on keeping
unwanted intruders out. The problem, summed up by Gus Hunt,
former CTO of the CIA, is that “when you get through the outer
layers, it is pretty easy to get the goods. The data is soft, often
unprotected, once an intruder sneaks through the outer layers.”
(Rosenbush & Boulton, 2014). The increasing collection of sensitive
digital information behind these walls, coupled with increasing
vectors of attack have made companies more alluring and
vulnerable. Major brands such as Target, Home Depot and Sony, to
name just a few, have suffered brand damaging headlines due to
security breaches (Sidel, 2014; Barrett, 2014). Apple also suffered
an embarrassing blemish when its iCloud backup service was
hacked to reveal nude photos of celebrities and others, including
even the locations where the nude photos were taken (Hill, 2014).
Rather than relying solely on imperfect perimeter protection,
designing for privacy can provide an extra layer of security and
integrity within the permeable outer perimeter by protecting the
data itself. Hunt and others describe how enabling end-to-end
encryption of data at movement and at rest can provide an extra
layer of defense and reduce vectors of attack (O’Connor, 2014).

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 14 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

Despite some law enforcement criticism, Apple, Microsoft and

others have started to enable two-factor authentication and strong
encryption to enhance individual control over the privacy of their
data and in turn to promote trust in those providers (Schneier,
2014). Innovative technology startups like Guardtime offer
solutions which organizations can use to identify real time changes
to data in such a way that the privacy of each change is maintained
while the integrity of the change is verified (Ewing, 2014). Such
technologies promise to meaningfully add the old fair information
practice principle of data quality to our commitment to security. In
a world in which digital information can be changed easily and
surreptitiously, rules and technologies protecting data quality,
privacy, and security simultaneously will be essential.
More generally, by empowering end users with more privacy
controls and employing tools which strengthen data integrity, the
systems we access are strengthened as we use them. In this
manner, privacy and data integrity are becoming a kind of fitness
indicator for systems security.
D. Trust
Privacy also promotes trust – trust in systems, trust in
networks, and trust in the relationships between individual people
and the entities that hold their data. Many commentators have
argued that privacy rules are somehow bad for business, as if the
protection of personal data is a kind of tax on profits or innovation
(Birnhack et al., 2015). Arguments of this sort are a staple of critics
or skeptics of privacy rules, yet as one of us has argued elsewhere,
this suggestion is a myth (Richards, 2015b). More fundamentally,
even privacy advocates spend inordinate time on the supposed
conflict between privacy and profitability, seeking to demonstrate
the “privacy harms” that the failure to protect personal information
can produce (Reidenberg et al., 2014). This may be correct, but
both the academic and popular literatures about privacy have
missed the important insight that privacy rules can promote trust

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 15

between users and platforms. And this privacy-backed trust can

create value, rather than taxing it.
When users trust that their information will not be misused
or abused by their confidantes, they share more information, more
freely, and more accurately with those confidantes. The classic
example of this is the relationship between doctors and patients.
The patient wants to be treated, but may be reluctant to share
embarrassing medical details. Nevertheless, because the doctor
promises and society enforces confidentiality, the patient shares
more completely, and receives better care as a result, secure in the
knowledge that sharing with the doctor as a trusted confidant will
be for his or her benefit. But note that in this trusted relationship,
not only are both parties better off, but also better information is
shared. The legally-enforceable promise of privacy (or to be
technical, confidentiality) promotes not only the welfare of both
parties, but also promotes further trust between the parties, making
both of them more likely to deal and share with each other in the
future. This is the information-sharing function of confidentiality
(Richards, 2015).
Privacy rules therefore promote trust, a form of value-
creation that negative conceptions of privacy like the privacy versus
profits frame of the privacy critics or the privacy harm fixation of
the privacy advocates fails to properly comprehend. In a digital
environment in which identity can be fluid and everything else is
seemingly negotiable and up for grabs, privacy rules create trust,
which in turn allows for long-term stable relationships to flourish
(Richards & Hartzog, 2015). Such forms of economic and social
sustainability will be essential in the digital economy, in order for
individuals and corporations to share more information and take
advantage of their new digital opportunities over the long term, but
only as long as they can trust that their data will not be abused by
the other parties in information relationships (Pentland, 2014,
p.177).

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 16 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

III. HOW TO PROTECT PRIVACY

Let’s sum up our argument so far. We have argued that
particularly in an age of big data, privacy should not be understood
as a matter of keeping secrets, but rather as a system of rules
governing the ethical collection use, and disclosure of personal
information. We have also argued that from this perspective,
privacy is not itself a value, but it is rather, like its converse
transparency, a regulatory tool that should be employed to advance
other values. We further suggested several values that the
imposition of privacy protections on data could serve, including the
protection of identity, equality, security and trust.
But why has such regulation not been successful, and how
can and should it be accomplished? For most of the past two
decades, the legal regime governing personal data has required little
more than notice of data collection and the choice to opt out. In
practice, this control-focused approach to personal data
management has been a colossal failure in providing people with
any meaningful ability to control how data about them is collected
and how it is used. People simply lack the time, energy, meaningful
choice, technical skills and cognitive bandwidth to manage their
data the way they manage their finances, even when they are highly
motivated to do so (Richards, 2015b). And as the big data
revolution continues apace, with more and more data about people
being held in more and more places to make more and more
decisions about them, what Daniel Solove calls the “failure of
privacy self-management” (Solove, 2013) will only become greater.
Something more needs to be done.
In this Part, we suggest several ways in which privacy as
information rules can (and is likely) to be effected in a digital
networked society in order to supplement the necessary but
deminished role that privacy self-management will retain.
A. Regulation
Any meaningful solution to the threats to our cherished
values posed by big data will require regulation. The United States

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 17

is the only major global democracy without a blanket data

protection law or formal data protection agency, and this will have
to change. More generally, new laws regulating participation in
data-based decisions will have to take two tracks. The first will be
procedural, reinforcing transparency of processing, the basis for
algorithmic decisions (so-called “algorithmic accountability”), and
providing meaningful notice of data practices and actual choice to
opt-out of unwanted collection, use, or disclosure. But the second
track must be substantive. Certain kinds of data collection, certain
kinds of processing, and certain kinds of decisions based upon
algorithmic outputs must be taken off the table. In particular,
processing that threatens identity, equality, security, data integrity,
and trust must be regulated and when necessary forbidden. For
example, data use that undermines civil rights laws or which
promises a kind of “digital redlining” should be outlawed the way
we have outlawed wiretapping or the use of consumer reports for
impermissible purposes.ii We might also mandate in certain cases
what Ryan Calo calls “consumer subject review boards,”
independent ethical boards assessing the implications of big data
for any entity that engages in sensitive consumer analytics at scale
(Calo, 2013). Alternatively, the creation of a regulatory commission
to oversee the fairness and honesty of big data practices (or the
vesting of such authority in an entity like the Federal Trade
Commission) might also be a sensible option. Given the problem of
“privacy unraveling,” we should consider either prohibitions on
certain kinds of disclosures that have an unraveling effect, or
prohibitions on decisions based upon those criteria. As with other
protections of meaningful human equality, procedural rules alone
will be insufficient, and substantive prohibitions need to be part of
the regulatory equation.

B. “Soft Regulation”
We are pragmatic enough to realize that formal regulation
along the lines of statutes or agency rulemaking will not be able to

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 18 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

solve all of the problems we identify and represents at best a limited

solution. This is the case not only because of political gridlock in
the United States, but more fundamentally because it is possible to
over-regulate, and that in a time of rapid technological change,
there must at times be a lag between innovation and regulation.
Yet even though formal regulation is an imperfect tool, other
kinds of regulation can be used to partially fill the gap. In the
United States, in the absence of a data protection agency or data
protection statute, other regulatory tools have addressed
information policy issues identified as implicating privacy of one
sort or another. These forms of “soft regulation” have been
unexpected, but have exerted an undeniable regulatory effect on
commercial actors in the digital sector (Cao, 2009). Two examples
of such soft regulation will suffice.
First, in the absence of a formal data protection agency in the
United States, the Federal Trade Commission has partially filled the
vacuum under its unfair and deceptive trade practice authority. By
investigating alleged breaches of privacy policies and entering into
settlement agreements with companies that broke those promises,
the FTC has emerged as an important regulator of the data trade
(Solove & Hartzog, 2014). These developments suggest that the FTC
will not only continue to be an important source of privacy
regulation, but will likely become even more important in the
future.
Second, even where domestic law is silent, the global nature
of the information economy means that actors within the United
States will increasingly fall within the regulatory authority of
foreign data protection authorities. Early examples of this
phenomenon include the attempts by French courts to hold Yahoo!
Liable for the sale of Nazi memorabilia in 2000, which led to
subsequent litigation in United States courts (Waters, 2005). More
recently, the Court of Justice for the European Union held that
Google was required to delete search results for a Spanish man who
had been adjudged bankrupt in the past (Google Spain Case, 2014;

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 19

Kulk & Borgesius, 2014). And in October of 2015, the European

Court of Justice invalidated the Safe Harbor Framework between
the United States and the European Union finding it provided
inadequate protections to EU citizens sharing data with US firms in
light of Edward Snowden’s disclosure of NSA spying (Schrems Case
2015). Although judgments of these sorts rarely have
extraterritorial application as a matter of law, they tend to have
extraterritorial application as a matter of effect. For example,
Yahoo! ultimately decided not to sell Nazi memorabilia worldwide,
the creation of a link removal tool for the European market by
Google could well lead Google and other players like Microsoft to
introduce similar data removal tools, once created, in the American
market as well (White & Benoit, 2014). The recent Safe Harbor
invalidation has lead thousands of companies to immediately
undertake efforts to continue their ability to transfer personal data
of EU citizens to the U.S. while a long term resolution unfolds
(Drozdiak & Schechner, 2015). The point here is not whether these
controversial foreign judgments are correct, but to observe that
precedent changing decisions are occurring and to consider their
global effect regardless of their merits as they do.
Third, and perhaps most encouraging, competition around
privacy itself can also serve as a form of soft regulation. Microsoft
has long been making investments in privacy research and
development and their general counsel, Brad Smith, has been an
outspoken critic of government encroachment upon privacy
(Wingfield, 2014). Apple’s rapid response to the iCloud celebrity
photo incident shows how seriously they are taking privacy as well.
Both of these companies generate their revenue primarily by selling
software and hardware-related products and services as opposed to
the data-intensive advertising business models of Google and
Facebook. As privacy revelations continue to gain headlines, the
initial reactions and resulting competitive dynamic offer promise to
organically advance privacy. Even Google has started to provide
users more insight and control over the data that Google collects
about them (Nash, 2012).

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 20 Big Data and the Future for Privacy [2016

Our point here is that regulation in the digital, networked,

global society can occur from a variety of perhaps unexpected
sources, and that the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass an
American data protection law does not stop other regulatory
entrepreneurs such as state or foreign governments or unexpected
federal regulators like the FTC from stepping into the regulatory
vacuum to make or influence regulatory policy. Perhaps the most
unexpected and encouraging of all is the emerging industry trend of
innovating, advocating and competing for privacy, not just
technology.
C. Big Data Ethics
Of course, formal law alone (even from unexpected sources)
will not be enough to guarantee effective privacy protection in our
digital age. Just as our culture of free speech depends on social
norms like a free and critical press, social tolerance for dissent, and
technologies of expression from printing presses to encryption to
Twitter, so too will any meaningful system of privacy rules rest on
technologies and social norms. In prior articles, we argued that
because big data creates increased institutional powers of
awareness and influence, it is essential that we develop some form
of “big data ethics” (Richards & King, 2013; Richards & King, 2014).
The precise form of such ethics can vary, but in order to ensure that
the critical human values that undergird privacy rules continue to
apply in our big data future, we argued that we must have a social
conversation beyond merely the compulsions of legal rules in order
to ensure that the tools of the new data science are employed in
ways that are not merely effective and efficient, but ethical as well
(Richards & King, 2014).
Ethical rules need not lag the way that legal doctrine
sometimes must. Big data ethics can be embraced into the
professional ethos of cross functional leaders on the ground in a
way that each can apply their own insights and expertise. By first
having a shared vision about what big data ethics mean for their
organization, leaders can exert a regulatory effect that emerges

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 2016] Big Data and the Future for Privacy 21

naturally around big data deployments, building trust and

responsibly harnessing the full power of big data in the process
(Schneider et al, 2015; Hirsch & King, 2015). While the precise
application of big data ethics should be left for further resolution,
their need is essential. Big data ethics, we contend, should be for
everyone: data subjects, data scientists, and data regulators. Big
data ethics will be, in large part, the future for privacy.
CONCLUSION
While it might seem that privacy is, at times, a quaint value
that has no place in our digitally saturated society, such a view is
misguided. Old forms of privacy (say from the 1920s) might seem
quaint today. But this is precisely because privacy is the result of
our human values filtered through a social conversation about how
those values should apply to our society at a particular social and
technological moment. The enormous changes that our digital
revolution has wrought and that data science promises to make in
the future do not excuse us from that conversation. On the
contrary, the advent of powerful data science tools that threaten our
identity, equality, security and trust in social and digital systems
make that conversation essential. When technology leaps forward
and destabilizes the social and technological assumptions on which
the protection of our values rests, our need to shore up those values
is never greater. And when we understand privacy as the rules that
govern information flows based upon our values and norms, we can
see that rather than being left out of our big data future, an ethical
system of privacy rules for the benefit of us all must instead be an
essential component of that future.

References

Barnett, E. (2010). Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is no longer a ‘social

norm’. The Telegraph. Retrieved from
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6966628/Facebooks-Mark-Zuckerberg-
says-privacy-is-no-longer-a-social-norm.html.

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