MIT and White House co-hosting workshop on privacy and big data

The MIT Technology Review has announced that it will co-host a workshop with the White House Office of Science and Technology on March 3.  The subject of the workshop will be using big data responsibly.  As analytical abilities and computational power continue to improve, big data will likely become a powerful tool that may present challenges to privacy law.  Specifically, large amounts of harmless or impersonal data could be used to churn out highly sensitive and personal information.  Here is the New York times article on Target's predictive abilities regarding pregnant shoppers.  It's a longer article and a bit dated now, but provides an interesting example of how invasive this practice can be sometimes.