 Yes, big data is indeed a threat to privacy of individuals and the reason is that with big data you can combine data sets that are available also in the public or the data sets that companies have or governments and there's very strong software available to analyze those data sets and that enables companies and governments to find correlations that are unexpected. For instance, if an individual makes a lot of car accidents it appears that they are also less careful about their own health. That information can be used by insurance companies to increase the insurance premium for health insurance if people appear to have more car accidents. So that can have a big impact on the individual lives of individuals. Is our data protection law adequate to address negative impact of big data? Yes, the current law has quite some general rules and that can be applied also to big data analytics. There's a general ground, legitimate interest ground, which could facilitate the analytics and there always has to be a balance between the interest of the company and the privacy of the individual. So if the impact on the individual is too big the ground will not apply. So yes, in general the rules are fine. There are some rules that are too strict. For instance, there's an exemption for scientific research which I think is too narrow. Also Tilburg University does big data analytics for scientific purposes and that is fine but they also want to develop more commercial apps and business models based on that and that cannot be covered by the scientific exemption while certain of those apps are actually quite beneficial to society and I think we should rethink that exemption to maybe broaden it up to also cover the possibility for more commercial apps in that respect. There's a proposal for a new EU regulation on privacy. Will this bring improvements for privacy? Yes, the EU regulation will bring many improvements. For starters the regulation will be applicable as one law in the whole of Europe. Till now we had a directive which needed to be transposed into national law in the various member states. That meant that all the laws slightly differed which made it difficult to apply it in if you have a lot of the business models are cross-border and made it difficult in development of apps for the whole of Europe. So yes, there are many improvements. Not all on big data. The jury is still out. There's many negotiations going on between the member states on how to deal with big data in the new regulation. In the first draft there was a prohibition to do actually analytics of sensitive data like health data that I think was a mistake because analytics of health data can bring big benefits to society. For instance you would like to know the impact of the fact that people become more and more obese in society on the health costs for governments. That is knowledge you want to know and if that is the analytics is forbidden to start with I think that is not a good idea. What you should regulate is decisions based on the outcomes and that I feel is not always best regulated by the regulation on privacy but we should have a debate on what types of discrimination had the outcomes of the analytics. What can you do with it? Can you actually discriminate based on health, on lifestyle, on genetics? That is a debate we need to have because if you would discriminate based on that because if you are obese you need to pay more health insurance. I think that would undermine the cohesion in society and that is insufficiently covered now.