Neil Lawrence: I suppose that nothing's ever so simple that it can be fully covered in a (fairly) short post.
You're right that spies could do this in the last century (although I think it took until the 1970s and 1980s until it was in full flow ...). Indeed the German Democratic Republic had a full "Information Society" organised by the Stasi. Famously it did access people's lives to the extent described in the post.
However, to collate the information you needed a very large investment in people to act as informers. They also had follow up teams who used to go into people's apartments and move things around to try and affect their mental health.
European data protection legislation actually dates from the early 1980s, and I think some of these issues where high in their minds when they introduced it.
The change is due to how easily we're making our personal data is available without a large network of spies, and the fact that there is now an economic incentive to collect it and affect our behaviour through knowing it.
David “goo.gl/LuFkzX” Tweed: +Neil Lawrence I entirely agree about there being a cost difference; that's one of the points I always make in talking to people. However, there's also the issue that while people can make an argument that would probably win the day on "the data I give you about me deserves privacy protection", the tricky bit is when X gives Y data that is "about me" but generated by X rather than me. It's not clear how you could get privacy for that info legislated for. I thought it was an interesting piece, but that to me is a key issue.
Neil Lawrence: Totally agree that issue will definitely come up! I've thought about it quite a lot. We hope to have some ideas for the way forward in the book we're trying to write. But agree that there's no easy solution.
We've still got space for delegates to our Machine Learning for Personalised Medicine Summer School next month in Manchester. There's a great speaker line up including Peter Diggle, David Balding, Chris Holmes, Mike Croucher, Win Hide, Oliver Hoffman.
Videos of GP summer school are uploaded to YouTube as school progresses (unfortunately sound is missing on the first two videos, we will try and fix later) #gpss15
An op-ed I wrote for the Guardian on Data Science in Africa. It motivates why we're so interested in Data Science there (and you should be to!) and gives an overview of the first data science in Africa workshop I organised with Ciira Maina, John Quinn, Andreas Damianou and Mike Smith at Dedan Kemathi University of Technology.