Use of Big Data to predict human behaviour demands regulation, says UCC professor

Privacy and data protection legislation worldwide is ill-equipped to deal with the Big Data revolution, according to a University College Cork professor.

Professor Maeve McDonagh from UCC’s School of Law and an academic lawyer was speaking at a panel discussion at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, organised by the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the United Nations and UCC.

“Big Data is now being used to predict individual behaviour and its use for this purpose can result in decisions being made about people based on that analysis, which limits their autonomy and potentially opens them to discrimination,” said Professor McDonagh.