Recent Posts by Wes Prichard

When I took wood shop back in eighth grade, my shop teacher taught us to create a design for our project before we started building it. The way we captured the design was in what was called a working drawing. In those days it was neatly hand sketched showing shapes and dimensions from different perspectives and it provided enough information to cut and assemble the wood project. The big data solutions we work with today are much more complex and built with layers of technology...

This is part 3 of a review of a paper titled Big Data and the Future of Privacy from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law where the authors assert the importance of privacy in a data-driven future and suggest some of the legal and ethical principles that need to be built into that future. Authors Richards and King suggest a three-pronged approach to protecting privacy as information rules: regulation soft regulation big data ethics New regulation will require new...

This is part 2 of a review of a paper titled Big Data and the Future of Privacy from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law where the authors assert the importance of privacy in a data-driven future and suggest some of the legal and ethical principles that need to be built into that future. Authors Richards and King identify four values that privacy rules should protect that I will summarize here from my own perspective. Identity Identities are more than government...

What is privacy and what does it really mean for big data? Some say that privacy and big data are incompatible. Recall Mark Zuckerberg's comments in 2010 that the rise in social media means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy. I recently read a paper titled Big Data and the Future of Privacy from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law where the authors argue the opposite. Their ideas provide more food for thought in the quest for guiding...

In a previous post I discussed a presentation given at Strata+Hadoop. Another one of the Law, Ethics, and Open Data sessions at Strata+Hadoop that I had a chance to attend was by two attorneys, Alysa Z. Hutnik and Lauri Mazzuchetti, from a private law practice talking about Strategies for Avoiding Big Privacy “Don’ts” with Personal Data. I found it very interesting and you can see their slides here. They provided the regulatory perspective on personal data and I must add that...

We're still in the early days of big data and a lot of the focus continues to be on use cases and figuring out how to get value from the technology and the data. Many of the use cases involve customer data or personal data in some way. And as is typical in these early days, secondary considerations are often glossed over until they become critical. One of those considerations, particularly for big data, is privacy. Companies tend to look at grabbing data and extracting value...

Why Location-Based Offers? Mobile technology is widely used in this 21st century and is becoming an effective medium to serve customers. Smart phones are capable of identifying the user’s geolocation that can then be used to find the nearest ATM, gas station, or hospital. Banks can use this same mobile technology to provide personalized offers to mobile customers tailored to their current location. Banks collect customer data through credit card transactions, bill pay, account...