Trying To Limit The Collection Of Personal Data Would Be A Lost Cause

Preventing companies and government agencies from gathering embarrassing or damaging personal information about you may be a fool’s errand, a White House panel on privacy in the age of big data said. Instead, lawmakers and regulators should focus their efforts on preventing the dissemination or other use of damaging personal data, according to the report from the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology Policy.

In some cases that damaging data may be as personal as an individuals’ genome that, if shown to a potential employer, could lead to job discrimination based on her likelihood of developing a degenerative disease. In other cases, organizations may collect the most common characteristics of terrorists or criminals, which could lead to discrimination against people who have those characteristics but are neither terrorists nor criminals. The report follows a three-month study led by White House Counselor John Podesta on how the explosion of new data sources and new tools to gather intelligence from them will affect Americans’ privacy.