For today’s homework, you will read an article about a recent privacy law in Washington State.

As data scientists, we aren’t really focused on the politics or legal details, but you should be interested in the big picture: what kind of data (or uses of data) are in greatest need for protection; which particular populations are most vulnerable to privacy abuses; and what responsibilities to individual companies and data scientists have to prevent those abuses.

After reading, fill in the short markdown file to confirm and check your understanding.

Reading

Here is the article, in the form of a blog post by a company called EasyLlama. (It looks like they sell training tools to other companies that have to stay in compliance with these laws, so that’s why they took the time to write this nice article.)

Questions

1. Did you read the entire post?

   (Answer yes or no)

2. Why do you think we asked you to read about the Washington Privacy Act?

   1. Through a quirk of regulatory rules, this state law actually applies to every company in the U.S. that uses Windows computers, because Microsoft is based in Washington.

   2. It passed quickly and overwhelmingly through the state legislature there, so it seems like a popular approach to privacy legislation that will probably be adopted in other states soon.

   3. Privacy regulation in the U.S. is mostly done at the state level, not at the federal government level.

   4. The proponents of this state law are proposing something similar at the federal level in Congress.

3. Which of the following hypothetical organizations would be covered under this legislation?

   (Write the letters of ALL correct answers.)

   1. A small company with just 10 employees that created a popular shopping app that millions of users have installed on their phones, including many in the Seattle area

   2. A big tech company headquartered in California that collects information on all U.S. college graduates, and sells a “JobScore (TM)” tool that tells hiring managers (including some at Microsoft) how good they predict that person will be at that job

   3. The Washington State Department of Corrections, which maintains information on everyone in state prison now or in the past, and has an agreement where they share some of that data with a company that manages their phone systems

   4. Seattle Grace Hospital, which collects and stores detailed health information on hundreds of thousands of local residents

4. Under this legislation, what would happen to a company who violates it?

   1. Their Chief Information Officer (CIO) could be charged with a crime by the Attorney General

   2. The company could be fined by the state Attorney General, regardless of any efforts the company made to fix their mistake

   3. Individuals would be able to sue the company, potentially recouping millions in monetary damages

   4. Individuals who demonstrate a company used data to discriminate against a protected group could use the court system to force that company to change their behavior

5. What is GLBA?

   1. An acronym for protected sexual identities specifically covered by this legislation

   2. A banking law that specifies some limitations on data collection by financial institutions

   3. A health agency created under the Clinton administration that monitors personal data collected by medical providers

   4. An acronym to help remember the types of data abuses that this legislation would protect consumers from

Submit command

To submit files for this homework, run one of these commands:

submit -c=sd212 -p=hw31 hw31.md 
club -csd212 -phw31 hw31.md

Download the file hw31.md to fill in and submit for this homework