We are concluding our Love Data Week series at the DePaul University Library with today’s topic: We are Data.
As we have seen this week, there are a multitude of ethical, technical, and privacy issues surrounding data and we have only skimmed the tip of the iceberg. Today we are discussing the unassailable fact that we as individuals have become the data that is being mined, analyzed, and from which decisions are being made. We sign up for “free” accounts and accept their Terms of Use, but often don’t realize what they’re doing behind the scenes with the way in which we interact with their platforms and to whom or to which companies they are selling our information.
In the 1980’s the United Kingdom introduced a Data Protection Act, which protects people from companies or organizations using the data that they produce. In 2003, the law was updated to include online data. In May 2018, the General Data Protection Act (GDPA) will be en force, which gives individuals a measure of protection in how their personally identifying data is processed, with individual privacy at the forefront.
The United States does not currently have an overarching policy about protection of personal data due the fact that Europeans tend to see privacy as a human right and Americans do not. However, the United States does have a number of individual acts for various industries, such as the HIPAA, which regulates what can be done with individual’s health data and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) which controls the ways in which financial institutions deal with people’s identifying information.
Do you think that the United States should have a Data Protection Law that gives individuals certain rights as pertains to their personal data or do you think those laws should be continued to be left to the states?
How does data help us to understand our world?
How does data fail to represent us as individuals?
To read all our Love Data Week stories follow our blog series at http://bit.ly/lovedatadepaul or join the conversation with @dpulibrarian on Twitter using the #lovedata18 hashtag .
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