Welcome to “This Week in Data”. My goal is to bring focus on broader data trends to data professionals and enthusiasts who are interested in data and its applications. Thank you for subscribing, and I would love any feedback to make this newsletter work better for you.
Oh gosh, what a huge week for data privacy. As various government agencies grapple with what it means to collect and use data, they continue to push the boundaries of legislation to create a sane and sensible policy that enables the trade of data while minimizing abuses of individual rights.
The Patriot Act. Remember me?A battle around Section 215 for the Patriot Act, which enables the FBI to collect website logs with a subpeona - however since they don't know who they could catch in the dragnet, they don't know who's rights they could be violating.
Go NYC! NY City votes to prohibit businesses such as retailers from using facial recognition without public notice.
Ugh, Massachusetts. Refusing to Ban Facial Recognition in MA, governor Charlie Baker veto'd a police reform bill, asking lawmakers to remove the part that requires a "statewide ban of facial recognition for police departments".
The CDC wants to play spy too. CDC is requiring states to give personal information of all individuals who've received a vaccine. Several states including New York have balked at this, and honestly sounds like a ridiculous requirement.
The consumer technology world has its share of privacy updates too. (1) Apple has made waves with its proposed privacy updates that enable users to opt out of tracking. The fight continues, with Apple SVP criticizing the fear mongering from marketing tech. (2) California AG has passed a fourth set of CCPA suggested modifications. Probably the final one, as AG Xavier Berrera looks to an impending nomination to lead Biden's Health and Human Services department, and CPRA guides us to the creation of a new Privacy Agency. (3) New Zealand also passed its privacy law, which attempts to keep pace with privacy changes around the world. Finally, COVID has created several privacy.
Small Bytes
Linkedin blogs about Coral, its SQL translation and rewrite layer which supports Spark, Presto, Hive and Pig. It is a way to create a technology agnostic interface for end-users.
Uber shows us uWorc, its no-code Universal Workflow Orchestrator for transformation pipelines. It looks like a modern in-house Alteryx - will GUI ETLs make a comeback?
Airbnb takes us on a dive into WIDeText - a multi-modal deep learning framework.
Dataviz on economic recovery in America. Hint: it’s uneven, as workers in low wage jobs (<$27,000/yr) have not seemed to recover at the same rate as others.
NeurIPS is this week. The annual AI/ML academic conference tends to be at the cutting edge of research.
Amazon launches Amazon Forecast Weather Index, which will ostensibly use weather to contribute to the prediction of customer behavior in retail.
Industry and Fundraising
Parallel Domain - $11M for synthetic data for AI
Bionic - $17M for automated analytics by reverse engineering architecture
Brightflag - $28M for legal spend management
Singlestore (prev MemSQL) - $80M for a fast relational database
Aurora acquires Uber's self-driving division ATG alongside a $400M investment.
“This Week in Data” is a weekly newsletter to help you stay up to date with developments in the data ecosystem. My goal is to bring focus on broader data trends to data professionals and enthusiasts who are interested in data and its applications. Topics include infrastructure, AI/ML, experimentation, analytics/BI, privacy, security.
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