{"id":2631,"date":"2014-09-08T09:16:01","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T14:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.poweradmin.com\/blog\/?p=2631"},"modified":"2015-04-24T15:49:26","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T20:49:26","slug":"big-data-and-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.poweradmin.com\/blog\/big-data-and-the-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Data and the Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BigBig Data is the term used to describe the commercial aggregation, mining, and analysis of very large, complex and unstructured datasets based on social media and Web-enabled workloads.<\/span><\/p>\n

Platforms like Google and LinkedIn have created a revenue stream from the data they collect. Everything from your Facebook posts and tweets, to your late-night shopping habits are analyzed. They supply businesses, individuals and public institutions with insights into the behavioral patterns of target audiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Raw digital data is a resource many companies are turning to in their quest for market advantage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dubbed \u201cthe new oil\u201d by the World Economic Forum, big data can improve decision making, reduce the time before taking a product to market and increase profits. But it can also raise significant risk, ranging from disastrous data breaches to concerns about privacy and compliance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Its place in the legal landscape is still being defined. And it\u2019s in your best interests to keep abreast of these developments<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The NSA Affair<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Big data made global news in 2013 with the revelations of fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden <\/a>concerning the US National Security Agency (NSA). Leaked documents confirmed that the Agency has been gathering sensitive information (including email and phone transcripts) on private individuals and public figures. The purposes of this data collection remain unspecified.<\/span><\/p>\n

Privacy advocates have pressed for legal action. And, after the NSA\u2019s loss in the District court of Washington DC the presiding judge made this comment on the agency\u2019s use of Big Data:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe threshold issue\u2026 is whether plaintiffs have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephony metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains all of that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyses, and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The court\u2019s analysis throws up vital issues. Namely:<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n