'Big data' triggers Brussels warning

Many people in direct marketing may still be questioning its existence, but ‘big data’ has now popped up on the radar in Brussels, with EU data chiefs threatening to come down hard on firms which do not have the right consent.
The Article 29 Working Party – which is made up of data protection chiefs of member states – has issued a new opinion which states firms must ensure they have individuals’ “unambiguous opt-in consent” in order to make use of personal data they have previously collected in big data projects.
Under EU data protection laws personal data must be “processed fairly and lawfully” and be collected for “specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a way incompatible with those purposes”.
Such consent is needed for tracking and profiling for direct marketing, behavioural ads, data-brokering, location-based advertising or tracking-based digital market research.
The group defines ‘big data’ as the extensive analysis of “gigantic digital datasets” using computer algorithms to exploit to make “better and more informed marketing decisions”.
It said that for consent to be considered ‘informed’, organisations must give individuals access to the profiles they have built about them, as well as the “logic of the decision-making” that led to it being built in the first place.
Individuals should also the right to update the information held on them, the Working Party said.
Information law specialist Marc Dautlich of Pinsent Masons warned: “Although there is not, strictly speaking, new material in the opinion, [it] indicates a hardening of attitude.
“Expect to spend time looking at your consents much more closely before you embark on your next big data project,” he added. “As one practitioner put it ‘we are all brand advisers now, this is no longer about just data protection stuff and it hasn’t been for some time – this is about your organisation’s reputation’.”