Author: Elisa Celis
Publisher: Data Science Ethics
Publication Year: 2019
Summary: The following article discusses how Facebook is currently the largest social media platform and stores enormous amounts of data. Facebook has data from a user’s profile, their messages (public and private), who they interact with, what posts they like and news sources they read, and even how long they look at different ads. Although many believe privacy to be a fundamental right, privacy ‘is never even mentioned in the United States Constitution. Instead, it falls under the catch-all of the 9th amendment.” This means that without a federal data privacy law, most privacy invasions fall under tort law that can be tried in civil court. To help regulate the amount of data being stored by companies, a common approach is called differential privacy. Differential privacy quantifies whether data is private “enough” not to store.