President Trump’s war on “information island” is bad news for your personal data

You may have missed the presidential executive order issued on March 20 due to the accumulated norm. This is called “stop waste, fraud and abuse by eliminating information silos.” ​​It essentially gives the federal government the power to consolidate all unclassified materials from different government databases. This seems like a relatively small action compared to killing life-sustaining institutions in the name of fighting waste and fraud. Regardless, the signal door masked the order. But it’s worth a look.

At first glance, the order seems reasonable. Noun and verb, one word Silo Arouse waste. Information in quarantine islands wastes the benefits of aggregated data. When you spread your knowledge, there is a danger of incomplete information making decisions. Sometimes expensive projects are replicated unnecessarily because the team doesn’t know that the business is doing the same job elsewhere. Business school lecturers feasted in the story of corporate silos leading to disaster. If only the right hand knows what the left is doing!

More importantly, if you are going to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, then crushing silos has obvious benefits. For example, what if a real estate company tells lenders and insurance companies that the property is worth a certain amount but reports “apparently… fraudulent valuation.” If investigative journalists and prosecutors can steal these figures from the island, they may expose this Skulduggery even if the perpetrators encounter evasion consequences.

But, before we declare war on the island, please stick with it. When it comes to sensitive personal data, especially data held by governments, silos have purpose. One obvious reason: privacy. Certain types of information (such as medical files and tax returns) are reasonably considered sacred and merged with other records. The law provides special protections that limit who can access this information. But the order could force the agency to hand it over to any federal official chosen by the president.

Then there is Big Brother’s argument – Private experts have reason to worry that the government can consolidate all information about someone, which is in itself a privacy violation. “The basis of any level of government privacy protection is that data can only be collected for specific, legal, identifiable purposes and then only for that legal purpose, rather than essentially a batch of data that the federal government can return to anytime, anywhere,” said John Davisson, senior consultant at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

There are practical reasons for the island. IRS fulfills its mission to withdraw taxes from all sources, and IRS provides payment methods for income earned from Crookery. The information is isolated from other government sources such as the Justice Department, which may like to do fishing expeditions to guess who is making money without revealing the source of the stolen goods. Similarly, even if many immigrants do not have access to services or collect social security, those who are legally usually pay taxes, levied billions of dollars in taxes on the Fed. If the silo is opened, forget to charge these taxes. Another example: Census. By law, this information is isolated because if it weren’t, people would be reluctant to cooperate and the entire effort could be compromised. (While tax and medical data are considered confidential, the order encourages agencies to re-check information access regulations.)