What's in a name? Juliet Capulet didn't see much value in a name in her famous, fictional dialog with Romeo Montague, but try telling that to today's big data brokers. As our modern, personal conveniences put more of our information out there to be gathered and sold, a consumer's confidence that information or misinformation isn't going to harm them -whether used in credit, housing, insurance and inexplicably employment decisions - is usually limited to some degree of wishful thinking that for-profit data brokers will be good stewards of this data. A recent speech by FCC commissioner Julie Brill - along with a newfound public awareness of just how pervasive data mining has become through the actions of the NSA and revelations from a whis-tleblower - has (hopefully) inspired a long overdue "national conversation" on data collection, both by our government and for profit data miners. (I generally loathe the term "national conversation" since they never last more than a couple of news cycles and end up being shelved by the next disaster, celebrity scandal, etc.) As Brill put it in her speech, "data miners are pulling pure gold. That's where the "big" in "big data comes in."
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