The Privacy Dilemma for Official Statistics in a Big Data World
Steve Mac Feely · Open Access Biostatistics & Bioinformatics · 2018
Over recent years the potential of big data for government, for business, for society has excited much comment, debate and even evangelism. Described as the ‘new science’ with all the answers [1] or a paradigm destroying phenomena of enormous potential [2] big data are all the rage. Official statisticians, already with a long history of using non-survey data, which are often very large in terms of volume, must decide whether big data is really something new and useful or just hype. On the one hand, some argue that big data needs to be seen as an entirely new ecosystem comprising new data, new tools and methods [3].