Big Data Now: 2015 Edition

Chapter 7. Security, Ethics, and Governance

Conversations around big data, and particularly, the Internet of Things, often steer quickly in the direction of security, ethics, and data governance. At this year’s Strata + Hadoop World London, ProPublica journalist and author Julia Angwin delivered a keynote where she speculated whether privacy is becoming a luxury good. The ethical and responsible handling of personal data has been, and will continue to be, an important topic of discussion in the big data space. There’s much to discuss: What kinds of policies are organizations implementing to ensure data privacy and restrict user access?  How can organizations use data to develop data governance policies? Will the “data for good movement” gain speed and traction? The collection of blog posts in this chapter address these, and other, questions.

Andy Oram first discusses building access policies into data stores and how security by design can work in a Hadoop environment. Ben Lorica then explains how comprehensive metadata collection and analysis can pave the way for many interesting applications. Citing a use case from the healthcare industry, Andy Oram returns to explain how federal authentication and authorization could provide security solutions for the Internet of Things. Gilad Rosner suggests the best of European and American data privacy initiatives—such as the US Privacy Principles for Vehicle Technology & Services and the European Data Protection Directive—can come together ...