Terence Craig and Mary E. Ludloff - Privacy and big data: [the players, regulators, and stakeholders]

To my Mother, Father, and my beautiful wife: without you there, there is no me. To my adopted Russian Crew, with a special shout out to Slavik and Sasha; to Dr. B, Sujata, and Elan, every time I hear how success ruins people, I think how you guys are the exception to the rule, thanks for having my back; to my Texas and North Carolina family (you guys know who you are and I am running out of room); to all the employees, past and present, that have helped me build PatternBuilders and last, but certainly not least, to my co-author and dear friend, Mary, thanks for one of the most rewarding collaborations of my career.

If, like us, you spent the last 20 years or so working in the high tech industry, youve had a birds-eye view of the evolving data privacy debate. No matter where you fall on the privacy continuumfrom a cavalier approach to how your data is being collected and used to a more cynical and, some might argue, paranoid view of the endless ways your information could be hijackedit is safe to say that the stakes have never been higher.

There is a perfect storm brewing; a storm fueled by innovations that have altered how we talk and communicate with each other. Who could have predicted 20 years ago that the Internet would have an all-encompassing effect on our lives? Outside of sleeping, we are connected to the Web 24/7, using our laptops, phones, or iPads to check our email, read our favorite blogs, look for restaurants and jobs, read our friends Facebook walls, buy books, transfer money, get directions, tweet and foursquare our locations, and organize protests against dictatorships from anywhere in the world. Welcome to the digital age.

Digital technology has created and nurtured a new world order where much that was impossible is now possible. We may not have personal jet packs or flying cars, but we do have video phones and combat drones. We may not yet inhabit the world George Orwell predicted in his dystopian novel, 1984 , a world in which there was no right to privacy and the government used surveillance and misinformation to control its citizens; however, our government has certainly used our personal information to its advantage, resulting in far more knowledge about us than even Orwell could have imagined.

Our world has changed; some might argue for the better and others for the worse. Today, we give away more information about ourselves and have more data collected and aggregated about us than any group in human history. Most of it we give away for simple convenience and the use of free or almost free services. Some of it is collected surreptitiously or through aggressive government action, such as the eight million requests the U.S. Department of Justice made to Sprint in 2009 for subscriber locations via their GPS phones.