Privacy in the age of big data: recognizing threats, defending your rights and protecting your family

摘要

Concerns regarding the management and security of Big Data'are rising, not least among archivists and record-keepers. Indeed, since the Library of Congress declared its attempt to archive every tweet in 2010 and the UK legal deposit libraries were authorised to begin annual web crawls in 2013, questions of security, management and access to vast datasets of archived web and social media have become increasingly prominent. Administration of such web-based collections, along with large volumes of other born-digital content held in archival repositories, raise connected ethical questions for archivists and record-keepers, in which the security of digital and cloud-based storage systems is key. However, while the growing significance of digital data may be widely acknowledged, the term 'Big Data'can be hard to pin down, encompassing a plethora of definitions and origin stories. In considering Privacy in the Age of Big Data for this review, there was an obvious need to consider the value of this book for the archival landscape. In researching this, a distinction in definitions of'Big Data'emerged.The term can refer to the uses of very large datasets, as defined by the Gartner IT Glossary for example, and it is also used to indicate the relative size of data, the primary definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary, generally referring to data too large to process on a standard laptop or desk top computer. As custodians of data, the primary role of archivists and record-keepers might be to care for and provide access to given data rather than conduct research using it. Size would therefore be of more significance than any potential analysis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the emphasis of Privacy in the Age of Big Data is on the former definition, the current and potential analysis of'Big Data':'the practice of companies collecting millions of facts about consumers and using these facts to predict trends and develop better sales and marketing strategies'(p. 8). While this business-oriented model may place the authors'conception of'Big Data' outside that of most archivists and record-keepers, the book remains a useful, general grounding in cyber security at a large scale, highlighting information management issues in contexts that resonate with similar situations encountered in the archival landscape.