Is GDPR being underestimated?

What are the implications of the largest data breach? How can cancer patient's data be safely shared? Why are frameworks needed for secure data collaboration? Can AI bots develop their own languages? Who do Americans spend their time with?

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The Queen's Speech was praised for providing certainty around the UK's position on data protection. 👑 By promising a new data protection law, there is no longer any room for ambiguity around whether Brexit will effect the adoption of GDPR. ✅

However, Sarah Gordon, Business Editor for the Financial Times, argues that "companies operating in Europe are dramatically underestimating the impact of new data protection regulation" and so are failing to adequately prepare for it. 😬 Furthermore:

Vanessa Leemans, cyber chief operating officer at insurance broker Aon, said fines for serious GDPR violations had the potential to reach the billions for large, global companies. She said that, despite building on previous initiatives such as the EU Data Protection Directive, “GDPR legislates a complete restructure of how personal data is stored and used — and, crucially, will hold companies more accountable for the data they hold”.

The private data of 198 million US voters was left publicly available online for almost two weeks. 🙈 Discovered by internet security firm UpGuard, the data trove, owned by the RNC, contained personal data such as "birth dates, addresses, voter registration details and social media posts' and was "available to download by anyone who knew to look for it from 1 June through 14 June". 😮 CRUCIAL - UpGuard CEO Mike Baukes said:

The fact that they left this data on a misconfigured server for anyone on the internet to get access to is actually disturbing. If the wrong type of group got a hold of that … that’s a list of names, addresses and, religious preferences. That’s a chilling outcome that could happen with the violence that we’re seeing at the moment.

-- The data firm contracted by the RNC, Deep Root Analytics, is now facing it's first class-action lawsuit. 👻

EXCELLENT article, by Kathy Giusti and Richard G. Hamermesh for Harvard Business Review, discussing approaches for safely sharing cancer patient's data. 📈 . Giusti and Hamermesh explain that one of the "most significant obstacles to advancing precision medicine" is as health data is "trapped in silos". As such:

We believe the solution to this obstacle is to bring trusted third-party research and support organisations together in a coordinated effort to directly engage cancer patients in data sharing.

-- Definitely worthwhile a read. 💭

Furthermore, James Reed, mental health CCIO, iterates that sharing health data is vital to patient care. 🙌 In particular, in the context of mental health, Reed argues that mental health data needs to stop being talked about as "kind of special or secret", as it is no different to other health data. 🏥 Reed points out that patients who suffer from mental health issues "often end up visiting several different emergency departments and hospitals", who have no idea "what treatment was given or what plan was in place for that patient". This disadvantages both the patient and the overall care system. 👨‍⚕️

After attending CogX17 this week and taking part in the Data Privacy, Data Ethics and GDPR panel, I wrote a post on why frameworks are needed for secure data collaboration. 🚀 Importantly:

I’m a big believer in aggregated data, as it enables companies to analyse and segment customers without needing to be focused on the individual, therefore keeping privacy intact. The decentralisation of models is set to completely disrupt how data is handled and will be a game-changer for increasing data privacy.

Miscellaneous

🤖 Two AI bots were negotiating and began communicating in their own non-human language.

🚗 Tesla hired deep learning expert Andrej Karpathy in key Autopilot role.

✅ Google outlined four steps they're taking to fight terrorism online.

📌 VisuAlgo: visualising data structures and algorithms through animations.

😅 Who do Americans spend their time with?

💯 ⌊a*x^2⌋ for 0 < a < 2 plotted on a number spiral: