Notice and consent in a world of Big Data

Nowadays individuals are often presented with long and complex privacy notices routinely written by lawyers for lawyers, and are then requested to either ‘consent’ or abandon the use of the desired service. The over-use of notice and consent presents increasing challenges in an age of ‘Big Data’. These phenomena are receiving attention particularly in the context of the current review of the OECD Privacy Guidelines. In 2012 Microsoft sponsored an initiative designed to engage leading regulators, industry executives, public interest advocates, and academic experts in frank discussions about the role of individual control and notice and consent in data protection today, and alternative models for providing better protection for both information privacy and valuable data flows in the emerging world of Big Data and cloud computing.