A White House Panel “calls on Congress to pass a national data-breach notification law and provide new warrant protection for stored emails” as reported by Computerworld. The May 1, 2014 White House Report entitled “BIG DATA: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values” also “called on Congress to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search email messages and other Web content stored for more than 180 days, instead of obtaining them with a simple subpoena.”
The White House Panel’s 5 recommendations are:
1. Preserving Privacy Values: Maintaining our privacy values by protecting personal information in the marketplace, both in the United States and through interoperable global privacy frameworks;
2. Educating Robustly and Responsibly: Recognizing schools—particularly K-12—as an important sphere for using big data to enhance learning opportunities, while protecting personal data usage and building digital literacy and skills;
3. Big Data and Discrimination: Preventing new modes of discrimination that some uses of big data may enable;
4. Law Enforcement and Security: Ensuring big data’s responsible use in law enforcement, public safety, and national security; and
5. Data as a Public Resource: Harnessing data as a public resource, using it to improve the delivery of public services, and investing in research and technology that will further power the big data revolution.
Big Data affects everyone’s privacy but it remains to be seen how Congress will react to the White House Panel’s recommendations.