ANA Files Comments on White House Study of “Big Data”

In January, President Obama directed White House Counselor John Podesta to lead a working group to conduct a comprehensive look at how the use of “big data” affects Americans. As part of an effort to gather as much information as possible, the White House has reached out to privacy stakeholders in industry, technology, and academic circles. Last month, Dan Jaffe of ANA's Washington office participated in a meeting at the White House with Podesta and other Administration staff.

As part of this effort, the White House Science and Technology Policy Office issued a formal request for information in the Federal Register.

Here are the comments that ANA filed yesterday. We emphasized that “big data” provides tremendous value to the U.S. economy and consumers. Any government restrictions on the commercial use of data must be narrowly focused on areas of real consumer harm, not theoretical harm. We also argued that it is absolutely critical that commercial privacy issues not be conflated with government privacy issues such as the NSA surveillance disclosures.  

If you have questions, please contact Dan Jaffe at djaffe@ana.net.