Legal expert warns of privacy issues with ‘big data’ mining

Privacy and data protection laws need to be tested against human rights obligations as ‘big data’, for all its potential security and other benefits can have unintended consequences, a legal expert has warned.

Professor Maeve McDonagh from University College Cork’s school of law, said a proposed new European regulation on data protection, while containing some innovative provisions, does not take appropriate account of developments in big data.

The big data concept refers to sophisticated analysis being applied to huge sets of data gathered from diverse sources, from apps to social networks, which can lead to unexpected correlations.