President Trump’s war on “information silos” is bad news for your personal data

He toured the accumulation of accumulated standards, maybe you missed a Presidential Executive Order Issued on March 20. It is called, “stopping waste, fraud and abuse by eliminating information silos.” It mainly gives the federal government the power to unify all non -rated materials from various government databases. Compared to the procedures that are still possible for life in the name of waste control and fraud, it may seem a relatively simple work. In any case, she overwhelmed her Signalgate. But it is worth a look.

At first glance, it seems reasonable. Both the name and the verb, the same word silo It raises waste. Isolating information in silos struggle the benefits of collected data. When knowing the solid, there is a risk of making decisions with incomplete information. Sometimes expensive projects are repeated unnecessarily, because the teams are not aware that the same work is done anywhere else in the institution. Lectures of the College of Business Administration dealt with tales, as corporate silos led to a disaster. If you only knew the right hand, what was the left to do!

More than that, if you are going to remove waste, fraud and abuse, there is a clear benefit to destroy silos. For example, what if Real estate company He told the lenders and insurance companies that property deserves a certain amount, but they reported what was “clearly … fraudulent assessments”, ” According to the Judge of the Supreme Court in New York. If correspondents and public prosecutors are able to investigate these numbers of silos, they may offer such skuldogger, even if the perpetrator ends with the escape of the consequences.

But before we declare war on silos, hold. When it comes to sensitive personal data, especially the government’s data, it serves silos. One clear reason: privacy. Certain types of information, such as medical files and tax declarations, are read as a sacosant – especially to integrate with other records. The law provides special protection that limits this information. But this may compel the agencies to hand him over to any federal official chosen by the president.

Then there is a Big Brother – The installation experts justify that the government can unify all the information related to a person in a detailed file, which in itself will be a violation of privacy. “The founding hypothesis to protect privacy for any level of the government is that the data can only be collected for a specific, legal and specific purpose, then it is only used for this legal purpose, it is not treated mainly as a bank of dimensions of data that the federal government can return to whenever it wants.

There are practical reasons for silos as well. Fulfillment of its mission to extract tax revenues from all sources of taxes, provides the Tax Authority Pay option For the income derived from, well, Crookerry. Information is organized from other government sources such as the Ministry of Justice, which you may like to go in fishing campaigns to guess who is the one who wanders in Bache without revealing where the looting came from. Likewise, not in the country legally Usually pay their taxesBillions of dollars are transferred to federalists, although many of these immigrants cannot access services or collect social security. If the open silo is adjusted, forget these taxes. Another example: census. Under the law, that information It is a harbingerBecause if not, people will be reluctant to cooperation and the full effort may be at risk. (While tax and medical data is secret, the agency’s heads encourage the reconsideration of information access regulations.)