Disclaimer


The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Data Requests

Frankly, my first reaction to this article about how various scientific groups are asking people to donate increasingly drastic amounts of personal data for research benefits was fairly simple:

I'm pretty sure I've seen this plot line before... and it didn't exactly end well for the protagonists. In fact, the misuse of the data the protagonist provided set up the villains' entire plan. (A Certain Scientific Railgun S, in case anyone is wondering exactly what anime I was thinking of.)

However, for all my random anime references, I am capable of recognizing the good that can come out of this sort of thing as well. I think we need to be careful about churning through massive amounts of data hunting for any useful pattern, because when one does that sort of thing, patterns tend to show up whether they are significant and useful or not. But some of the things we find by taking advantage of our ability to analyze all of this data and recheck other conclusions against it will certainly be useful.

As the article notes, I think the key is going to be in robust notification about how and why that data is being used. Part of the utility of such giant data requests is going to be in using them for whatever comes up, but doing so without ensuring that the donors know where their information is going could all too easily lead to serious problems. The only way to safeguard against it is to make sure that donors are notified when a new project that would use their data is proposed.

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