Cars Suck Up Data About You. Where Does It All Go? by John R Quain via @nytimes

Cars have become rolling listening posts. They can track phone calls and texts, log queries to websites, record what radio stations you listen to - even follow you and tell when you are breaking the law by exceeding the speed limit.

Something that we see to have accepted as normal but do we really know what happens to the data and how it is used?  I think this is a question that needs to be investigated further.  We are used to ticking boxes and giving explicit permission for our data to be shared and used - how is that done (if it actually is) for our cars in this increasingly connected world?

GDPR: About to Lose Your BI and Analytics? How to Save Your Investment by Majken Sander via @TimeXtender

Are you facing the risk of losing the investment you’ve made in your BI and Analytics Program? The first examples of companies choosing to shut down parts of their BI and analytics solutions have started to surface.

Interesting. I guess if you were better organised and had a Data Protection Officer (or similar) it could not stop the use of your data.

A Dead Simple Tool To Find Out What Facebook Knows About You by Katharine Schwab via @FastCoDesign

Facebook builds complex profiles of each of its users so it can offer data points to advertisers for targeting ads. Some data points are obvious, like your age and interests, but many may surprise you. This free tool reveals the unsettling amount of information Facebook tries to deduce about you.

Wow - just wow.

Everything Must Go: What Happens to Data After a Business Closes? by Richard Stiennon via @infomgmt

When closing the doors for good - whether it’s for strategic, economic or other reasons - auctioning off IP is just one direction that valuable company data can head in.

I guess I had never thought to stop and think about what has happened to my data when a store shuts down for whatever reason.  You trust it to be handed correctly but do you really know what has happened to it and how safe it is?

Artificial Intelligence Is Setting Up the Internet for a Huge Clash With Europe by Cade Metz via @WIRED

The European Union's recent General Data Protection Regulation has a clause that restricts "automated individual decision making" and provides a "right to explanation." But "automated individual decision making" is what neural networks do, and complicated machine learning algorithms defy easy explanation.

I can see the problem - it's not always so easy to explain how a decision was made.

Data protection for big data

In these two white papers they look at data protection from two different angles.  But the overall consensus is that is must be done, should be done properly and is a business necessity with all the data protection legislation worldwide. Big data should not make any difference to the necessity to do something about data protection, just that the method might be slightly different due to the size of that data.

In this TDWI white paper by IBM on data protection for big data they advocate putting data protection in place from the start which is sensible considering the cost of doing anything later is always higher.  Then in this Information Management article by Maria Aspan she discusses why banks still struggle with Big Data.  I have to agree that I suspect it is partially privacy concerns but also a large part of disparate systems as banks merged in the past.