Newswise — Dawn Woodard is a professor or Operations Research and Information Engineering in Cornell’s College of Engineering, who teaches courses on data mining and the use of statistical methods for achieving business goals. She comments in the wake of House and Senate investigations into data brokerage firms. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV gave data companies until today to respond to his request for information.

She says:

“The use and distribution of certain categories of information on individuals, such as personal health data, is closely regulated, for instance under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. However, large amounts of personal financial and commercial transaction information is bought and sold, and used for purposes like marketing and political campaigning, with little regulation.

“Take for instance the Romney and Obama campaigns, which both are purchasing and mining large quantities of data on the financial, social and lifestyle habits of potential voters. One major privacy issue this raises is that companies or campaigns could potentially learn protected information about an individual by mining the sources of unprotected information; the regular purchase of products from a diabetes supply company, for instance, would indicate that an individual is very likely to be diabetic. More subtly, by aggregating a number of seemingly inconsequential pieces of information like purchase habits of food or over-the-counter medications, one could potentially obtain strong evidence regarding private information like HIV status.

“To understand the extent to which one can reconstruct personal information from data that were not intended to reveal that information, consider the great lengths taken by the U.S. Census Bureau to protect individual identities when making census data available to the public. Such data can only be made available in highly aggregated form, and responses for rare categories like individuals age 100 or over cannot be revealed for small geographic regions.”

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