Beware of the Data Rustlers

摘要

Don Villwock, a corn, wheat, and soybean grower in Indiana, stores farm records going back three decades on a computer that has no Internet connection. He's not a Luddite: Villwock worries that his sales and crop yield data might fall into the wrong hands and compromise his business. In this age of Big Data and massive customer information security breaches, that's not a casual concern. At coffee shops and tractor dealerships across the Corn Belt, the debate about the collection and security of proprietary data has flared up in the last year as national and state farm bureaus push for the establishment of data use guidelines by companies.