Session 4:  Privately Held Data: Opportunities, Challenges, and Lessons for Researchers

This session will explore data collected by private companies, which often contain useful insights that can help alleviate major societal challenges including climate change, healthcare, food security, and disinformation. Accessing this data, however, can be costly, controversial, and unreliable. Solving these challenges could help unlock vast amounts of data for researchers, providing novel insights and better guidance for policymakers. With lessons from social media platforms, mobile health applications, and retailers, this session will highlight best practice for accessing data held by private companies and consider solutions to the challenges of commercial sensitivity, data protection, and emergency preparedness. Attendees can expect to leave with an understanding of the value to be gained from privately held data, topical data security challenges, and an overview of partnership enhancing technologies.

Gina Neff, Professor and Executive Director, Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy, University of Cambridge

Henry T. (Hank) Greely, Professor, Stanford School of Medicine, Director, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University

Cyndi Grossman, Senior Director, Biogen Digital Healt

Uyi Stewart, Chief Data and Technology Officer, Data.org

Gavin Starks, Founder and CEO, Icebreaker One

Plenary session and closing remarks