Big Data And Power Asymmetries: Recent White House Report Addresses Opportunities And Challenges Created By Increasingly Interconnected Technologies

In the latest round of reactions to the Edward Snowden leak, on May 1, 2014, the Obama Administration called for the United States to take a leading role in developing new standards for privacy protections in light of the ongoing "social, economic, and technological revolution." In a report titled "Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values," the White House tasked a wide range of experts to undertake a review of big data analytics and the benefits and pitfalls thereof in what was fundamentally termed "a scoping exercise." While recognizing the enormous gains to be realized through the application of new technologies which generate and gather enormous amounts of data, the report warns that data and privacy protections stemming from the Fourth Amendment and famously enunciated by the dissent of Justice Brandeis in the 1928 Supreme Court case, Olmstead v. United States, might simultaneously be at risk of quiet abrogation by the operation of predictive analytics.