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Open Data: Governments Widen Amount of Available Data, but Privacy Issues Complicate Efforts
Last month President Obama released an executive order that calls information held by the government a “valuable national asset” with value that multiples when it is easily accessible to the public. The order requires that federal government information be open and machine-readable by default.
Obama said that “One of the things we’re doing to fuel more private sector innovation and discovery is to make vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history. And talented entrepreneurs are doing some pretty amazing things with it. Starting today, we’re making even more government data available online, which will help launch even more new startups. And we’re making it easier for people to find the data and use it, so that entrepreneurs can build products and services we haven’t even imagined yet.”
The US isn’t alone in releasing Open Data. In fact, the UK is actually considered to be the leader in terms of the amount of data which they’ve made public and in serving as a model for how to make the data available. As many as 30 countries, in Europe, many developed nations, and countries like Costa Rica, Kenya and India have all set up services for distributing data collected and held by those governments.
But as government-supplied Open Data becomes increasingly pervasive, privacy issues come into play. In order to protect privacy, data is often ‘scrubbed and anonymized’ to remove references from the data that could be used to associate it with any particular individual. Anonymizing data though is not easily done.
A study by MIT researchers Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye and César A. Hidalgo found that they were able to take cellphone data that had been anonymized and were able to fairly easily deduce enough from the data to be able to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals from whom the data was taken. William Heath, chairman and co-founder of Mydex, commented that “Anything unique is discoverable. Anonymized personal data has to be treated as personal data and not open data.”
