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Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Spur Research
turnkeylinux writes "Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service (home). The project encourages developers, researchers, universities, and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrate that data into their own AWS applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various US Census databases, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl."
We (or at least some of us) also want privacy to prevent annoyances and for protection.
I certainly don't want to have to answer to the government anytime I say the word "bomb" or "terrorist" on the telephone, in email, or in an IM.
I also don't want some company complaining anytime they see me buy a product from one of their competitors.
I also don't want to have everyone on the internet knowing my social security number, address, license plate number, or telephone number.
That isn't because of "shame" that's because people can be assholes, and some people will abuse information. I don't care if people that I trust know these things, but I don't think shame or masks or whatever has anything to do with getting one's identity stolen, or having the government ensure you don't say anything bad about them.
That said, I don't think this public dataset business really affects individual privacy. This is more a database of already public, but hard to find, data, that doesn't contain personally identifiable anything in it.
Let's just hope they keep it that way.