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49 Wake Forest L. Rev. 393 (2014)
Big Data Ethics

handle is hein.journals/wflr49 and id is 405 raw text is: BIG DATA ETHICS Neil M. Richards* Jonathan H. King INTRODUCTION We are on the cusp of a Big Data Revolution. Increasingly large datasets are being mined for important predictions and often surprising insights. We are witnessing merely the latest stage of the Information Revolution that has transformed our society and our lives over the past half century. But the big data phase of the revolution promises (or threatens, depending on one's perspective) a greater scale of social change at an even greater speed. The scale of the Big Data Revolution is such that all kinds of human activities and decisions are beginning to be influenced by big data predictions, including dating, shopping, medicine, education, voting, law enforcement, terrorism prevention, and cybersecurity. This transformation is comparable to the Industrial Revolution in the ways our pre-big data society will be left radically changed. The potential for social change means that we are now at a critical moment; big data uses today will be sticky and will settle both default norms and public notions of what is no big deal regarding big data predictions for years to come. Individuals have little idea concerning what data is being collected, let alone shared with third parties. Existing privacy protections focused on managing personally identifying information are not enough when secondary uses of big data sets can reverse engineer past, present, and even future breaches of privacy, confidentiality, and identity.1 Many of the most revealing personal data sets such as call history, location history, social network connections, search history, purchase history, and facial recognition are already in the hands of governments and corporations. Further, the collection of these and other data sets is only accelerating. * Professor of Law, Washington University. We would like to thank Ujjayini Bose, Matthew Cin, and Carolina Foglia for their very helpful research assistance. ** LLM Graduate in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, Washington University and Vice President of Cloud Strategy and Business Development for CenturyLink Technology Solutions. The views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily the views of his employer. 1. See Daniel J. Solove, Introduction: Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma, 126 HARv. L. REV. 1880, 1881 (2013).

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