The Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams LLP has announced the launch of a pan-industry initiative to highlight the benefits and address the risks raised by analytics in the age of Big Data by developing voluntary guidelines for their responsible use by organizations.

"Analytics assumes an increasingly important role across a range of disciplines, supporting such endeavors as education, scientific research, healthcare, demographic analysis, delivery of services to the elderly and disabled and energy conservation,” noted Centre for Information Policy Leadership President Marty Abrams. “It is important that we arrive at an approach for analytics that promotes the use of analytics in these disciplines, protects the individual and can be applied across a global marketplace.”

To develop this guidance, the centre will leverage the expertise of specialists in analytics and privacy executives.

Senior Policy Advisor Paula Bruening, who is the initiative’s project leader, explained, "Analytics holds dramatic potential to fuel innovation and economic growth. To realize that potential, it will be necessary to address the data protection and privacy issues that the use of analytics raises. The risks to individual privacy must be solved so organizations will be able to use technologies and new sources of data for analytics robustly and with confidence.”

The project will create clear guidance, she noted, aimed at mitigating risks raised by analytics without impeding their use.

The project’s goals include describing the nature of analytics, benefits to organizations, governments and individuals and necessity for innovation and economic growth; establishing a vocabulary for analytics that is consistent with the terminology used by specialists in the field, and developing a framework for the responsible use of analytics.

Meanwhile, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership has also announced the appointment of Jonny Shipp, head of Digital Confidence–Telefónica Europe PLC, to its Advisory Board.

—IAPP Staff