BIG DATA ― For Good or Evil …
What is commonly now called “Big Data” is central to American commerce as well as the day-to-day lives of Americans. Big Data is very often discussed in terms of individual privacy issues. Increasingly, however, it has become apparent that analysis of data collected by large companies from many consumers can serve many good purposes such as enhancing individual safety. The Firm has taken on a matter with implications for when a large company has an obligation to use that data for good purposes.
Significantly, while the emergence of Big Data in daily life is relatively new, long-established principles of tort law are well-stated to address these new scenarios and impose a duty of care. Where there is Big Data aggregation in commerce, those who collect it for gain also have a duty to deploy it to protect customers against foreseeable harms. Put differently, a business analyzing and exploiting consumer data for profit may be able to deploy its analytics tools to achieve protections or other benefits for those same consumers with minimal effort ― and under traditional tort law analysis, in some scenarios, it has a duty to do so.
The litigation is unusual for the Firm’s commercial litigation practice — a wrongful death case involving the murder of an Uber driver while on the job ― but the issues have broad implications. A brief we recently filed opposing a motion to dismiss provides an introduction to those issues at pp. 1-5 and 19-32 here …
