Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Big Data, Privacy, and Trusted Web: What Needs to Be Done

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society

Abstract

This perspective paper discusses challenges and risks of the information age, and the implications for the information and communication technologies that need to be built and operated. It addresses ethical and policy issues related with Big Data and how procedures for privacy-preserving data analyses can be established. It further proposes a concept for a future, self-organizing and trusted Web and discusses recommended legal regulations as well as the infrastructure and institutions needed.

This is second part of the paper: D. Helbing and S. Balietti , From social data mining to forecasting socio-economic crises, EPJ Special Topics 195 , 3–68 (2011), see http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1140%2Fepjst%2Fe2011-01401-8.pdf © EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag 2011. It is reprinted here with kind permission and with minor stylistic improvements.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 19.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 29.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that taking the wrong decision occurred here even without social pressure, while it is known since the famous Asch experiment that individuals give predominantly wrong answers (against their own judgement), if the people before them do so [14].

  2. 2.

    For example, willingness to allow collection of personal data only for scientific purposes.

References

  1. L. Backstrom, C. Dwork, J. Kleinberg, Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography. Proc. 16th Int. World Wide Web Conference (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Apple confirms $1 bn data center, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/04/apple_1bn_north_carolina_data_center/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  3. NSA plans massive, 65 MW, $2 bn data center in Utah, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/03/new_nsa_data_center/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  4. Microsoft consumes Chicago data center, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/20/ascent_ch2_datacenter/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  5. Google admits Scandinavian data center landing, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/05/google_finland_data_center/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  6. Google pays $ 51.7 m for newspaper destruction metaphor, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/google_buys_defunct_paper_mill/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  7. Intel sees future in Mega Data Center, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/18/the_intel_cloud/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  8. D. Helbing, S. Balietti, From social simulation to integrative system design. Visioneer White Paper (2010), see http://www.visioneer.ethz.ch. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  9. C. Cattuto, W. Van den Broeck, A. Barrat, V. Colizza, J.-F. Pinton, A. Vespignani, Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks. PLoS ONE 5(7), e11596 (2010). Accessed 10 Sept 2010

    Google Scholar 

  10. 123 People, http://www.123people.com. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  11. A. Mazlouimian, D. Helbing, Y.-H. Eom, S. Lozano, S. Fortunato, How citation boosts trigger scientific paradigm shifts. (in preparation) (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  12. D. Helbing, M. Treiber, N.J. Saam, Analytical investigation of innovation dynamics considering stochasticity in the evaluation of fitness. Phys. Rev. E 71, 067101 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. J. Lorenz, H. Rauhut, F. Schweitzer, D. Helbing, How social influence undermines the wisdom of crowds (2010) (Submitted)

    Google Scholar 

  14. S.E. Asch, Studies of independence and conformity: a minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychol. Monogr. 70(9) (1956)

    Google Scholar 

  15. R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, (Basic Books, 1984), pp. 169–170

    Google Scholar 

  16. D. Helbing, W. Yu, K.-D. Opp, H. Rauhut, The emergence of homogeneous norms in heterogeneous populations. Am. J. Sociol. (2010) (submitted)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Oakland Crimespotting is an interactive map of crimes in Oakland and a tool for understanding crime in cities, http://oakland.crimespotting.org. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  18. Data, data everywhere. Econ. (25 February 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Internet Reputation Management: neutralize negative publicity, http://www.internet-reputation-management.com/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  20. Reputation Management Consultants, http://www.reputationmanagementconsultants.com/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  21. Reputation Defender, http://www.reputationdefender.com/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  22. Squidoo: internet reputation management, http://www.squidoo.com/internet-reputation-management. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  23. Micro Payment: professional payment provider, http://micropayment.de. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  24. Privatsphäre als Luxusgut, http://www.nzz.ch/blogs/nzz_blogs/betablog/privatsphaere_als_luxusgut_1.7266824.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  25. It seems it not so easy to clear ones name on-line, even when trying hard. This is specially true for traces left on social network Web sites, for which specific applications, such as http://suicidemachine.org/, have been created in order to accomplish this task. For a discussion based on a true story see http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/2115238/Best-Way-To-Clear-Your-Name-Online. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  26. F. Winter, H. Rauhut, D. Helbing, How norms can generate conflict. Jena Econ. Res. Papers (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  27. D. Helbing, A. Johansson, Cooperation, norms, and conflict: a unified approach. SFI Working Paper #09-09-040 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  28. D. Helbing, W. Yu, The outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals under noisy conditions. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA (PNAS) 106(8), 3680–3685 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  29. D. Helbing, W. Yu, H. Rauhut, Self-organization and emergence in social systems. Modeling the coevolution of social environments and cooperative behavior. SFI Working Paper #09-07-026 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  30. L. Lessig, Against Transparency, The New Republic, 9th Oct, 2009, http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  31. D. Helbing et al., Dynamic decision behavior and optimal guidance through information services: models and experiments, in Human Behaviour and Traffic Networks, ed. by M. Schreckenberg, R. Selten (Springer, Berlin, 2004), pp. 47–95

    Google Scholar 

  32. D. Helbing, M. Christen, Mit Rauschen und Reibung gegen finanzielle Blasen, submitted to Wirtschaftswoche (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  33. P. Bajaria, J. Yeo, Auction design and tacit collusion in FCC spectrum auctions. Inf. Econ. Policy 21(2) 90–100 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  34. C. Schultz, Transparency and Tacit Collusion (2001), http://www.econ.ku.dk/ansatte/phd/?pure=files%2F23184032%2F2001-04.pdf

  35. B. Kluger, S.B. Wyatt, Preferencing, internalization of order flow, and tacit collusion: evidence from experiments. J. Financ. Quant. Anal. 37(3), 449 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  36. M. Mäs, A. Flache, D. Helbing, Individualization as driving force of clustering phenomena in humans. PLoS Comput. Biol. (2010) (in print)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Four million British identities are up for sale on the internet, http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6718560.ece. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  38. Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=threatreport. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  39. RottenNeighbor.com was a website created to post information about neighbors and find information about new potential neighbors before moving. Launched in July 2007, it was discontinued in July 2009

    Google Scholar 

  40. D. Sally, I. Ron, H. Ursula, An EU Code of Ethics for Socio-Economic Research, The Institute of Employment Studies, 2004

    Google Scholar 

  41. E. Diener, R. Crandall, Ethics in social and behavioral research (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978)

    Google Scholar 

  42. C. Frankfort-Nachmias, D. Nachmias, Research Methods in the Social Sciences (Worth Publishers, New York, 2008), Chap. 4: “Ethics in Social Research”

    Google Scholar 

  43. The British Psychological Society, Report of the Working Party on Conducting Research on the Internet, http://www.bps.org.uk/the-society/code-of-conduct/ (2007). Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  44. Ethical Guidelines, Social Research Association (2003), http://www.the-sra.org.uk/ethical.htm. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  45. Statement of Ethical Practice for the British Sociological Association, BSA, the British Sociological Society (2002), http://www.britsoc.co.uk/equality/Statement+Ethical+Practice.htm. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  46. Recommendations of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethics Working Committee, http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  47. Google chief: only miscreants worry about net privacy, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  48. Google admits it accidentally gathered WiFi data, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8a23b394-5fab-11df-a670-00144feab49a.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  49. Google to hand over intercepted data, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db664044-6f43-11df-9f43-00144feabdc0.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  50. Lawyers Claim Google Wi-Fi Sniffing “Is Not an Accident”, http://gizmodo.com/5554960/lawyers-claim-google-wi+fi-sniffing-is-not-an-accident. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  51. Wi-Fi Data Captured By Google Street View Cars Included Passwords, http://gizmodo.com/5567460/wi+fi-data-captured-by-google-street-view-cars-included-passwords. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  52. Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  53. Did you watch porn? http://www.didyouwatchporn.com. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  54. What the Internet knows about you. This page checks your browser history and determines which of the 5000 most popular Internet websites you’ve recently visited, http://www.whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  55. A. Janc, L. Olejnik, Feasibility and Real-World Implications of Web Browser History Detection, http://w2spconf.com/2010/papers/p26.pdf. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  56. P. Eckersley, How unique is your web browser? Electronic Frontier Foundation (2009). Accessed 10 Sept 2010

    Google Scholar 

  57. Panopticlick: how unique and trackable is your browser? https://panopticlick.eff.org. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  58. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline of Facebook’s privacy policy modifications over the years, http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  59. Watchdog files complaint over Facebook ‘privacy’ settings, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/epic_facebook_privacy_complain/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  60. Senator calls on FTC to tackle social-net privacy, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20003415-36.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  61. EU warns on Facebook privacy, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/technology/27iht-facebook.4-417144.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  62. German minister warns Facebook over privacy rules, http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/05/german_minister_warns_facebook_over_privacy_rules. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  63. Details of 100 m Facebook users collected and published, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10796584. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  64. G. Wondracek, T. Holz, E. Kirda, C Kruegel, A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users. Technical Report TR-iSecLab-0110-001

    Google Scholar 

  65. X. Su, T.M. Khoshgoftaar, A survey of collaborative filtering techniques. Adv. Artif. Intell., Article ID 421425 (2009), http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2009/421425. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  66. E.J. Candes, T. Tao, The power of convex relaxation: near-optimal matrix completion. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 56, 2053–2080 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  67. M. Bezzi et al. (eds.), Privacy and Identity Management for Life. (Springer, Berlin, 2010) (5th IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology [Book 320])

    Google Scholar 

  68. G. Ziegler, C. Farkas, A. Lörincz, A framework for anonymous but accountable self-organizing communities. Inform. Softw. Technol. 48, 726–744 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  69. Government requests directed to Google and YouTube, http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  70. Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-googlecia/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  71. Apple’s Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed, http://gawker.com/5559346/apples-worst-security-breach-114000-ipad-owners-exposed. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  72. T-Mobile confirms biggest phone customer data breach, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/17/t-mobile-phonedata-privacy. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  73. Soziale Netzwerke verraten künftiges Käuferverhalten, http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/digital/internet/Soziale-Netzwerke-verraten-kuenftiges-Kaeuferverhalten/story/19928880. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  74. WUALA, Backup. Store. Share. Access everywhere, http://www.wuala.com/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  75. Tor: anonymity online, http://www.torproject.org/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  76. Freenet, the free network, http://freenetproject.org/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  77. Project Gaydar, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  78. R. Agrawal, R. Srikant, Privacy-preserving data mining. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (2000), pp. 439–450

    Google Scholar 

  79. P. Samarati, L. Sweeney, Generalizing Data to Provide Anonymity when Disclosing Information. Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (ACM Press 1998)

    Google Scholar 

  80. C.C. Aggarwal, P.S. Yu, Privacy-Preserving Data Mining: Models and Algorithms (Springer, 2008), p. 530

    Google Scholar 

  81. M. Atzori, F. Bonchi, F. Giannotti, D. Pedreschi, Anonymity preserving pattern discovery. VLDB J. 17(4), 703–727 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  82. B.-C. Chen, D. Kifer, K. LeFevre, A. Machanavajjhala, Privacy-preserving data publishing (Survey). Found. Trends Databases 2(1–2), 1–167 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  83. F. Giannotti, D. Pedreschi, Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy: Geographic Knowledge Discovery (Springer, 2008), p. 410

    Google Scholar 

  84. A. Monreale, G. Andrienko, N. Andrienko, F. Giannotti, D. Pedreschi, S. Rinzivillo, S. Wrobel, Movement Data Anonymity through Generalization. Trans. Data Priv. 3(2), 1–121 (2010), http://www.tdp.cat/issues/abs.a045a10.php. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  85. J. Krumm, A survey of computational location privacy. Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. 13(6), 391–399 (2009). Accessed 10 Sept 2010

    Google Scholar 

  86. D. Helbing, W. Yu, The future of social experimenting. PNAS 107(12), 5265–5266 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  87. The Future of Social Experimenting: The Full Story, http://www.soms.ethz.ch/research/socialexperimenting

  88. Mechanical Turk is a market place for work, https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  89. EFF: Forget cookies, your browser has fingerprints, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176904/EFF_Forget_cookies_your_browser_has_fingerprints. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  90. R. Geambasu, T. Kohno, A. Levy, H.M. Levy, Vanish: Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data. Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Montreal, Canada, August 2009

    Google Scholar 

  91. Vanish: self-destructing digital data, http://vanish.cs.washington.edu. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  92. QLectives (Quality Collectives), http://www.qlectives.eu. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  93. European privacy seals for IT products and IT-based services, https://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  94. Ixquick: the world’s most private search engine, http://ixquick.com/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  95. Datenschutz fr iPhone-Apps, http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/100930_MBusiness_Apps_sch/index. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  96. DIASPORA, The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network, http://www.joindiaspora.com/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  97. EU Commission plans more harmonisation of data protection law, http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=11228. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  98. K.P. Smith, N.A. Christakis, Social networks and health. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 34, 405–429 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Further Reading

  1. M. Michael, J.E. Moreira, D. Shiloach, R.W. Wisniewski, Scale-up x Scale-out: A Case Study using Nutch/Lucene. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IEEE International, 2007

    Google Scholar 

  2. L. A. Barroso, Hölzle, The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines. (Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  3. A. Jacobs, The pathologies of big data. ACM Queue, 7(6) (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  4. SSD Myths and Legends—“write endurance”, http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  5. Digging into Data, http://www.diggingintodata.org/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  6. Transparency is at the heart of this Government. Data.gov.uk is home to national & local data for free re-use, http://data.gov.uk. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  7. Data.Gov Empowering people, http://www.data.gov. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  8. Dataverse Project: an open-source application for publishing, citing and discovering research data, http://thedata.org/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  9. Apache WSIF: Web Service Invocation Framework, http://ws.apache.org/wsif/. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  10. ETH Financial Crisis Observatory, http://www.er.ethz.ch/fco/index. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  11. ICKN Galaxy Advisors, http://ickn.org. Accessed 10 Sept 2010

  12. PostRank: intelligence from the social web, http://www.postrank.com/

  13. M.M. Gaber, A. Zaslavsky, S. Krishnaswamy, Mining data streams: a review. ACM SIGMOD Rec. Arch. 34(2), 18–26 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  14. A. Bifet, R.K. August, Data Stream Mining: A Practical Approach. The University of Waikato (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. J. Leskovec, L. Backstrom, J. Kleinberg, Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2009), pp. 497–506

    Google Scholar 

  16. A. Narayanan, V. Shmatikov, Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets. IEEE Symposium on In Security and Privacy SP 2008. IEEE Symposium (2008), pp. 111–125

    Google Scholar 

  17. R.Jones, R. Kumar, B. Pang, A.Tomkins, Vanity fair: privacy in querylog bundles. CIKM ’08: Proceeding of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management (2008), pp. 853–862

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors of this White Paper are grateful to Karl Aberer, Andras Lörincz, Panos Argyrakis, Endre Bangerter, Andrea Bassi, Stefan Bechtold, Bernd Carsten Stahl, Rui Carvalho, Markus Christen, Mario J. Gaspar da Silva, Fosca Giannotti, Aki-Hiro Sato, David-Olivier Jaquet-Chiffelle, Daniel Roggen, Themis Palpanas, Elia Palme, Jürgen Scheffran, David Sumpter and Peter Wagner.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zürich, CLU E1, Computational Social Science, Claussiusstrasse 50, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Dirk Helbing

Authors
  1. Dirk Helbing
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dirk Helbing .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Helbing, D. (2015). Big Data, Privacy, and Trusted Web: What Needs to Be Done. In: Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15078-9_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15078-9_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15077-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15078-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation