There are seemingly so many lofty promises about what big data will accomplish for businesses; out of the bunch, the one that most tantalizes companies is the ability to get within a hair’s breadth of their customers through copious data collection and creative analytics. Some consumers hearing these reports are beginning to say, “Funny, I don’t remember giving permission to these companies to keep tabs on my every move.” Now companies, technologists and lawmakers are starting to hear those concerns.

Dale Skivington, chief privacy officer of Dell Technologies Inc., is one of those listening. She says that people are probably familiar with privacy notices for individual, one-off uses of their stats. But, “the problem with big data is, the power of it is using the data in ways that you didn’t envision when you collected the data,” she told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Dell EMC World.

“That is the dilemma for privacy and big data, and that’s where the privacy community is trying to develop tools for businesses and organizations to do a balancing act,” she explained.

Skivington said that by May of 2018, a new European law will regulate “profiling automated decision making that’s used for marketing purposes.”

“You have to have an opt-in for using that data. Companies are going to struggle with how to implement that,” she said, adding that the penalty could be as bad as four percent of annual revenue.

Working the data grey areas

Nick Curcuru, VP of the Big Data Practice at Mastercard International Inc., also joined in on the interview. He said that companies can find savvy ways to glean the information they need without impinging on privacy. “We try to take that personally identifiable information out of the analysis,” he said.

“We actually, on the front end, say, ‘I don’t care who you are. What I care about are your patterns, and can I figure out what those patterns are to create affinities,'” he added.

To do analytics, he argued, data scientists “don’t need to know names, phone numbers, or addresses.” He concluded that prime targets for greater engagement can be culled from much larger “anonymized” pools, minimizing risk to individuals and businesses.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell EMC World.

Photo by SiliconANGLE