Data Sharing Threatens Privacy Nature (10/11/07) Vol. 449, No. 7163, P. 644
as it appeared in the October 15, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
he field of computational social science relies heavily on access to electronic datasets such as email records, Web-search histories, and mobile-phone call logs, and such data sharing offers "enormous potential ... for lines of research that shed new light on basic social-science questions," says Cornell University network analysis specialist Jon Kleinberg. But concerns about how such data sharing might threaten privacy could create a major public backlash, says Consortium for Political and Social Research director Myron Gutmann. Kleinberg agrees that "as the number of these types of study increases, the community is clearly going to need to engage in deeper discussions about the right way to safeguard privacy in working with these kinds of data." Software tools for protecting privacy while sharing data are often developed by social scientists with heavy computer science backgrounds, but as these tools are mainstreamed they are adopted by less experienced academics. The need for an institutional and systematic strategy for strengthening the privacy rights of those whose data is used thus becomes obvious, says Boston University researcher Marshall Van Alstyne. A recent study by the U.S. National Academies reached a similar conclusion, in that individual researchers cannot be given sole responsibility for protecting privacy. However, social scientists are quick to point out that private firms, unlike academics, operate with few restrictions on retaining and exploiting personal data. Click Here to View Full Article
