Schedule: Policy & Ethics sessions

The first generation of chief privacy officers were typically attorneys, charged with the formulation and enforcement of privacy policies.  Times have changed.  Given the speed and complexity of technology, the privacy policy is necessary but hardly sufficient.  Because we live much of our lives in public, both online and offline, the Internet is transforming the anonymity of our cities into the familiarity of small towns.   Privacy is deeply ingrained within the technology that manages this personal data.  The products and services driving this transformation must consider privacy from the earliest design sessions. 

Today’s engineer CPO, and I’m one, must deeply involve themselves with the technology and product design process to bake-in privacy.  This new breed of CPO is comfortable in an engineering scrum, product focus group, reviewing pending regulations, or analyzing A/B test results.  They have the historical awareness, frontier spirit, regulatory caution, technical chops, and innovator’s curiosity to work through the toughest data issues. The promise of the engineer CPO is that products, not only safeguard privacy, but compete on it.

Data fuels 21st century business and society. Thanks to the rapid pace of innovation and widespread adoption of information technologies, data has become both a strategic asset and a potentially crippling liability. As consumers grow increasingly concerned about the stewardship of their data, policymakers, academics and advocates around the world are questioning boundaries and considering risks:

• What is private and what is not?
• How should organizations explain what they’re doing with data?
• What should happen when data is stolen or misused?
• And, in an era of globalization, how do we manage the diverse social and legal expectations?

These questions are urgent in the current business climate where trust in our most basic institutions has been eroded. As organizations cope with growing tension between innovation, privacy and security, they are discovering that appropriate use and protection of data has broad impact on their reputations and bottom lines—a new, holistic ethos of data environmentalism is necessary.

Analytics can push the frontier of knowledge well beyond the useful facts that already reside in big data, revealing latent correlations that empower organizations to make statistically motivated guesses—inferences—about the character, attributes, and future actions of their stakeholders and the groups to which they belong.

This is cause for both celebration and caution. Analytic insights can add to the stock of scientific and social scientific knowledge, significantly improve decision-making in both the public and private sector, and greatly enhance individual self-knowledge and understanding. They can even lead to entirely new classes of goods and services, providing value to institutions and individuals alike. But they also invite new applications of data that involve serious hazards.

This panel considers these hazards, asking how analytics implicate:

· Privacy — What are the privacy concerns involved in the kinds of inferences and applications that analytics enable? Are these concerns sufficiently well understood and accounted for?

· Autonomy — What are the ethical stakes of applications that draw on analytic findings to selectively (and perhaps inadvertently) influence or limit individuals’ choices or decision-making?

· Fairness — If organizations rely on certain discoveries to set criteria for unequal treatment or access, do analytics implicate questions of fairness and due process? More specifically, what if organizations draw on analytics to individualize risks or engage in adverse selection or cream skimming?

· Fragmentation — Do attempts to personalize and customize goods and services (including media content) to individuals on the basis of inferred preferences shield individuals from certain views and issues and thus undermine social belonging and the functioning of the public sphere?

The panel will also debate the appropriate response to these issues, reviewing the place of norms, policies, legal frameworks, regulation, and technology.