Big Data: Values and Governance
Hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
This workshop is the last in a series of three events co-hosted by the OSTP and academic institutions across the country in response to President Obama’s call for a review of privacy issues in the context of increased digital information and the computing power to process it.
Advance registration required.
About the Workshop
This workshop will examine the policy and governance questions raised by the use of large and complex data sets and sophisticated analytics to fuel decision-making across all sectors of the economy, academia and government. The event will feature a series of panel discussions, a closing roundtable, and keynote address.
The goal of this workshop is to broaden the policy conversation along two dimensions. First, the workshop will explore the range of values that may be challenged by the growing use of big data techniques.
These values include:
(1) A variety of privacy-related values, including control over both personal information and physical being, and autonomy in decision-making;
(2) Anti-discrimination values, including concerns about preserving fairness in an economic and political environment shaped by the growing technological capabilities to store and analyze data; and
(3) Concerns about democratic values, accountability, and social cohesion where data-driven “personalization” fosters in an increasingly fragmented society.
Second, the workshop will explore the range of mechanisms — regulatory, professional, and organizational — that can help ensure these values are protected. After identifying both the values at issue and the current instruments and practices for protecting those values, participants will seek to identify gaps between the two. This initial work will inform the conversation around fostering a big data environment that allows society to benefit from the insights of big data in a manner that remains true to societal values of individual privacy, democracy, and fairness.
Download workshop background materials
Agenda
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9:00–9:15 |
Welcome Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, UC Berkeley School of Information |
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9:15–10:45 |
Panel I Moderator: Deirdre K. Mulligan, UC Berkeley School of Information |
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10:45–11:15 |
Break |
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11:15–12:30 |
Panel II Moderator: Paul Ohm, University of Colorado Law School |
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12:30–1:30 |
Lunch |
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1:30–3:00 |
Panel III Moderator: Omer Tene, International Association of Privacy Professionals |
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3:00–3:30 |
Break |
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3:30–5:00 |
Governance Roundtable Moderator: David Vladeck, Georgetown University Law School |
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5:00–5:30 |
Closing Keynote John Podesta, Counselor to the President |
The UC Berkeley School of Information thanks the Ford Foundation for travel support for academics and civil society participants.
The UC Berkeley School of Information thanks The Future of Privacy Forum and Palantir for generously providing funding for food throughout the day's events
These funds were solicited and collected to support UC Berkeley’s efforts in hosting this event. They were not solicited or collected on behalf of the Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) or the White House, and acknowledgment of a contributor by the School of Information does not constitute an endorsement by OSTP or the White House.
Participant Bios
Kenneth A. Bamberger is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. His research focuses on the exercise of governance power by both public and private institutions, and ways to safeguard the exercise of that power. In particular, he writes on government decision-making, protecting public values in corporate compliance, and questions of technology in governance with a focus on the regulation of information privacy. He teaches courses on Administrative law, the First Amendment, technology and governance, and Jewish law. His recent article "Technologies of Compliance," considers implications of the increased use of technology and automation in regulatory compliance and risk management. And with professor Deirdre Mulligan at the UC Berkeley School of Information, Bamberger is author of several major studies of corporate privacy practices. Their forthcoming book compares privacy developments in the US, France, the UK, Spain and Germany in light of changing technologies, and changing threats.
Julie Brill was sworn in as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission April 6, 2010, to a term that expires on September 25, 2016. Since joining the Commission, Ms. Brill has worked actively on issues most affecting today’s consumers, including protecting consumers’ privacy, encouraging appropriate advertising substantiation, guarding consumers from financial fraud, and maintaining competition in industries involving high tech and health care. Commissioner Brill has received numerous national awards for her work protecting consumers, including the 2014 Privacy Leadership Award from the International Association of Privacy Professionals. She has testified before Congress and published numerous articles on privacy, credit reporting, data security breaches, pharmaceuticals and tobacco. Before she became a commissioner, Ms. Brill was the senior deputy attorney general and chief of consumer protection and antitrust for the North Carolina Department of Justice, a position she held from February 2009 to April 2010. Commissioner Brill has also been a lecturer-in-law at Columbia University’s School of Law. Prior to her move to the North Carolina Department of Justice, Commissioner Brill was an assistant attorney general for consumer protection and antitrust for the state of Vermont for over 20 years, from 1988 to 2009. Prior to her career in law enforcement, Commissioner Brill was an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York from 1987 to 1988. She clerked for Vermont Federal District Court Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr., from 1985 to 1986. Commissioner Brill graduated, magna cum laude, from Princeton University, and from New York University School of Law, where she had a Root-Tilden Scholarship for her commitment to public service.
Fred H. Cate is a distinguished professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and Center for Law, Ethics and Applied Research in Health Information. He specializes in privacy, security, and other information law issues, and appears regularly before Congress, government agencies, and professional and industry groups on these matters. Professor Cate is a senior policy advisor to the Center for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams LLP and a member of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Committee Cybersecurity Subcommittee, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Privacy Oversight Board, the board of directors of The Privacy Projects, the board of directors of the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, and the board of directors of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
amalia deloney coordinates the media policy initiatives of the Center for Media Justice and the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net). She has over 17 years of experience in community and cultural organizing, with a specific interest in human rights, cultural rights and traditional knowledge. At CMJ, amalia uses her extensive experience for field-building, community-building, and policy advocacy. Born in Guatemala, amalia earned her B.A. in urban studies and history and her J.D. with a focus on social justice.
Cynthia Dwork, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dr. Dwork has also made seminal contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing some of her earliest work establishing the pillars on which every fault-tolerant system has been built for decades. She is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Seeta Peña Gangadharan is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute (OTI). Her research lies at the intersection of technology, civil society, and communication policy. She writes about the nature of digital inequalities, data and discrimination, social dynamics of technology adoption, communication rights, and media justice. She also researches the politics of communication policymaking, who’s heard, and who has power in debate and decision-making. She is a former postdoctoral fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and has a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Ari Gesher is a senior engineer and engineering ambassador at Palantir Technologies. At Palantir Technologies, Ari has split his time between working as a backend engineer on Palantir's analysis platform, thinking and writing about Palantir's vision for human-driven information data systems, and moonlighting on both Palantir's privacy and civil liberties team and philanthropic engineering team. His current role involves understanding and discussing Palantir's role in the world of analytics, big data, the future of technology, and it’s impact on the world. An alumnus of the University of Illinois computer science department, Ari has worked in the software industry for the past fifteen years, including a stint as the lead engineer for the SourceForge.net open source software archive. Ari often speaks on the topic of big data and the limits of automated decision-making. Recently, he's spoken at GigaOm Structure, MIT's Technology Review's EmTech Conference, Harvard Business School, the Institute for the Future's Tech Horizons Conference, multiple O'Reilly Strata Big Data Conferences, the Economist Future Technologies Summit, and PayPal's TechXploration series.
Cameron Kerry is a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab and the Sara E. and Andrew H. Tisch Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His work there focuses on technology and innovation, especially the use of data, protection of data privacy, and flow of information across borders. He previously served as general counsel and acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he led the task force that developed the Obama administration’s privacy blueprint, Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World and was a leader on a wide of range of other issues laying a new foundation for U.S. economic growth in a global marketplace, intellectual property, trade, and global rule of law development. Prior to joining the government, he was in private law practice in Boston and Washington and taught telecommunications law as an adjunct professor at Suffolk University Law School. He lives in Boston Massachusetts.
Barbara A. Koenig, Ph.D., is professor, Institute for Health & Aging, University of California, San Francisco. She is an anthropologist who works in the inter-disciplinary field of bioethics. She helped found the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University (and was on the faculty from 1993 through 2005); from 2005 to 2011 she created and led the Biomedical Ethics Research Program at Mayo Clinic. Koenig pioneered the use of empirical methods in the study of ethical questions in science, medicine, and health. Her current focus is emerging genomic technologies, including: biobanking, return of research results to participants, the use of whole genome sequencing in newborn screening, and using deliberative democracy to engage communities about research governance. Dr. Koenig has been continuously funded by NIH since 1991. Currently, she co-directs a “Center of Excellence in ELSI Research” at UCSF, leads an NCI ROI on return of results in genomic biobanks, and directs the ELSI component of a U19 award focused on newborn screening in an era of whole genome analysis. She has been an active participant in federal policy, including the “Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing.” Her most recent book is Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. She is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center.
Thejo Kote is a founder and the chief executive officer of Automatic, a technology startup working to redefine and improve people’s relationship with their cars and driving. Automatic was inspired by research conducted by Thejo and his co-founder at UC Berkeley in the area of transportation and behavior change. Thejo is also a co-founder of NextDrop, a Knight News Challenge winning social enterprise which provides residents in urban India with access to accurate, timely information on the availability of intermittent piped water. He holds a master’s degree from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, India.
Deven McGraw is director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), where she promotes policies that protect individual privacy as personal health information is shared electronically. Appointed by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to serve on the federal Health Information Technology (HIT) Policy Committee, she chairs its Privacy and Security Workgroup (called the “Tiger Team”). She serves on the executive committee of the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative, the steering committee of the Electronic Data Methods (EDM) Forum, and is member of the Markle Foundation’s Connecting for Health Steering Group, the eHealth Initiative’s Leadership Council, and the IOM’s Clinical Effectiveness Research Innovation Collaborative. She received her J.D. magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center and received her Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. Publications include: “Legal and Policy Challenges to Secondary Uses of Information from Electronic Clinical Health Records,”; “Paving the Regulatory Road to the Learning Health Care System,”; “A Policy and Technology Framework for Using Clinical Data to Improve Quality,” (with Alice Leiter); “Making the Case for Continuous Learning from Routinely Collected Data,” (with Okun et al.); “Building Public Trust in Uses of HIPAA De-Identified Data.”
Deirdre K. Mulligan is an assistant professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Prior to joining the School of Information in 2008, she was a clinical professor of law, founding director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, and director of Clinical Programs at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Mulligan is the policy lead for the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center, which brings together researchers at UC Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon University, Cornell University, Stanford University, and Vanderbilt University. MIT Press will publish her groundbreaking study of corporate privacy practices in the U.S. and Europe, conducted with Kenneth Bamberger, in 2014. She is chair of the board of directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and co-chair of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board.
Paul Ohm is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. He teaches courses in all of these topics and more, and in 2010 he was awarded the prize for excellence in teaching by the students of Colorado Law. In his work, Professor Ohm tries to build new interdisciplinary bridges between law and computer science. Much of his scholarship focuses on how evolving technology disrupts individual privacy. His article Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, 57 UCLA Law Review 1701, has sparked an international debate about the need to reshape dramatically the way we regulate privacy. He is commonly cited and quoted by news organizations including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. From 2012 to 2013, Professor Ohm served as senior policy advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. Prior to joining the academy, he served as an honors program trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice's computer crime and intellectual property section. Before that, he clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He is a graduate of the UCLA School of Law. Before attending law school, Professor Ohm worked for several years as a computer programmer and network systems administrator after earning undergraduate degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Yale University. Today he continues to write thousands of lines of Python and Perl code each year. Professor Ohm blogs at Freedom to Tinker.
Nicole A. Ozer is the technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of California. Nicole is a nationally recognized expert on issues at the intersection of consumer privacy and government surveillance and free speech and the Internet. Nicole is the author of numerous legal and policy publications, including Losing the Spotlight: A Study of California’s Shine the Light Law, Privacy & Free Speech: It’s Good for Business, a primer of dozens of case studies and tips for baking safeguards into the business development process, and Putting Online Privacy Above the Fold: Building a Social Movement and Creating Corporate Change (NYU Review Law & Social Change, 2012). Nicole graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College, studied comparative civil rights history at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and earned her J.D. with a Certificate in Law and Technology from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California Berkeley.
Zach Pardos is an assistant professor in a joint position between the School of Information and Graduate School of Education. His focal areas of study are formative assessment in virtual learning environments and educational data mining. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the Tutor Research Group in 2012. Funded by a National Science Foundation Fellowship (GK-12) he spent extensive time on the front lines of K-12 education working with teachers and students to integrate educational technology into the curriculum as an assessment tool to be used formatively. He is program co-chair of the 2014 conference on Educational Data Mining and on the organizing committee for the 2014 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. He has received numerous academic awards and honors for extensions of his thesis work on “Predictive Models of Learning” including a top prize applying his educational analytics in the 2010 KDD Cup, an international big data competition on predicting student performance within an intelligent tutoring system.
John Podesta is currently serving as counselor to the president. His duties include overseeing climate change and energy policy. In 2008, he served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition team, where he coordinated the priorities of the incoming administration’s agenda, oversaw the development of its policies, and spearheaded its appointments of major cabinet secretaries and political appointees. He is the former chair of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Prior to founding the Center in 2003, Podesta served as White House chief of staff to President William J. Clinton. He also recently served on the President’s Global Development Council and the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Additionally, Podesta has held numerous positions on Capitol Hill, including counselor to Democratic leader Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (1995-1996). A Chicago native, Podesta is a graduate of Knox College and the Georgetown University Law Center, where he is currently a visiting professor of law. He is the author of The Power of Progress: How America’s Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate and Our Country.
Erika Rottenberg is responsible for worldwide legal affairs at LinkedIn, including corporate, commercial, IP, litigation, compliance, and privacy matters. Before joining LinkedIn in July 2008, Erika served as senior vice president, general counsel and secretary for SumTotal Systems, a talent development enterprise software company. Prior to that, she was vice president for strategic development and general counsel, at Creative Labs, the company that brought multimedia to the PC. She helped both companies navigate the regulatory policies and challenges specific to technology-centric public companies. Erika started her legal career at the Silicon Valley-based law firm of Cooley Godward. She received her J.D. from University of California Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and her B.S. in special and elementary education from State University of New York at Geneseo. Erika also serves on the board of directors of the Silicon Valley Law Foundation.
James B. Rule is a long-time researcher and writer on privacy and personal information. His books include Private Lives and Public Surveillance (1973), The Politics of Privacy (with McAdam, Stearns and Uglow, 1980), and Privacy in Peril (2007). Besides his scholarly publications, his shorter writings have appeared in The Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is currently affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley.
AnnaLee Saxenian is dean and professor in the School of Information and professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006), explores how the "brain circulation" by immigrant engineers from Silicon Valley has transferred technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in China, India, Taiwan, and Israel. Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1994), Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (PPIC, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002). Saxenian holds a doctorate in political science from MIT, a master's in regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in economics from Williams College.
Rainer Stentzel is thehead of project group, data protection reform, German Federal Ministry of the Interior.Since March 2012 Rainer Stentzel leads the Task Force Data Protection within the German Ministry of Interior. He is head of the German delegation in the DAPIX working party dealing with the EU data protection package. Before he worked on Internet policy issues (2010-2012), as German liaison officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2009) and information sharing and data protection in the police sector (2003-2008). From 2002 to 2003 he was judge in administrative law. Rainer Stentzel studied in Göttingen, Berlin and Paris and holds a Ph.D. in law. He published among others scientific articles about policymaking and democracy in the European Union and information sharing and data protection.
Mitchell L. Stevens is Associate professor of education and (by courtesy) business and sociology at Stanford, where he also serves as director of digital research and planning for the Graduate School of Education and the vice provost for online learning. He has longstanding interests in the measurement of educational accomplishment and alternative instructional forms.
Omer Tene is vice president of research and education at the International Association of Privacy Professionals. He is a senior fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum and an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He is a professor at the College of Management School of Law, Rishon Le Zion, Israel (on leave of absence).
Lee Tien is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in free speech law, including intersections with intellectual property law and privacy law. Before joining EFF, Lee was a sole practitioner specializing in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation. Mr. Tien has published articles on children's sexuality and information technology, anonymity, surveillance, and the First Amendment status of publishing computer software. Lee received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Stanford University, where he was very active in journalism at the Stanford Daily. After working as a news reporter at the Tacoma News Tribune for a year, Lee went to law school at Boalt Hall, University of California at Berkeley. Lee also did graduate work in the program in jurisprudence and social policy at UC Berkeley.
David C. Vladeck is a professor of law at Georgetown Law School, where he teaches federal courts, civil procedure, administrative law, and a seminar in First Amendment litigation. Professor Vladeck recently returned to the law school after serving for nearly four years as the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. At the FTC, he supervised the bureau’s more than 430 lawyers, investigators, paralegals and support staff in carrying out the bureau’s work to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or fraudulent practices. Before joining the law school faculty full-time in 2002, Professor Vladeck spent over 25 years with Public Citizen Litigation Group, a public interest law firm, handling and supervising complex litigation. He has briefed and argued a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and more than sixty cases before federal courts of appeal and state courts of last resort. He is a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an elected member of the American Law Institute, an adviser to the Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third: Information Privacy Principles and a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Professor Vladeck frequently testifies before Congress and writes on administrative law, preemption, First Amendment, privacy and access to justice issues.
Nicole Wong is deputy US chief technology officer, advising on Internet policy and privacy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole was the legal director at Twitter and vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. She is also a former partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie. Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including multiple appearances before the US Congress regarding Internet policy, censorship and privacy. She has taught media and Internet law and policy courses at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the advisory board to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and has served on the governing committee of the ABA Communication Law Forum and the board of directors of the First Amendment Coalition. Nicole received her law degree and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University.
Scott Young, MD, serves as executive director and senior medical director of Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute, and associate executive director for clinical care and innovation at The Permanente Federation. He leads a nationwide team that is integral to Kaiser Permanente's commitment to improve the care and wellness of its nine million members. His work includes commissioning the discovery, development, and spread of programs and best practices focused on care delivery, education, and member experience. Dr. Young is the former director for health IT at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Prior to joining AHRQ, he served as a senior clinical advisor in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Dr. Young’s policy experience also includes service as a Robert Wood Johnson health policy fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. He is the former executive vice president of the Utah HealthCare Institute, a not-for-profit organization providing clinical care, outreach programs, medical education, research, informatics, and health policy services. Dr. Young is a founding member of Intermountain Health Care’s Utah Valley Family Practice Residency. Dr. Young received his medical degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1987 and completed his training at the Fairfax Family Practice Residency. He is board certified in family medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Previous Workshops Hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Big Data Privacy: Advancing the State of the Art in Technology and Practice (March 3, 2014)
Organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
View webcast
The Social, Cultural and Ethical Implications of Big Data (March 17, 2014)
Organized by the Data & Society Research Institute and New York University’s Information Law Institute
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