There’s going to be an interesting debate at Acadia University tomorrow night on the tension between Big Data and privacy concerns, and the organizers are inviting anyone interested to attend.

“Big Data or Big Problems? The Pros and Cons of Data Analytics Debate” will take place Tuesday from 7 to 8:30 pm at the K.C. Irving Centre Auditorium at Acadia on Tuesday. Anyone interested in attending the event can register for free here.

The topic is an important one for Atlantic Canada given the efforts led by T4G President Geoff Flood to establish a centre of excellence in Big Data in Atlantic Canada. The debate is a nice complement to the Big Data Congress, which will be held in Halifax in October.

The two debaters are authorities in privacy law and in digital technologies. Catherine Tully is the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Review Officer for Nova Scotia and has spent the past 15 years working across Canada in the area of privacy law.

Giles Crouch, the managing principal of Thistlwood, has 20 years of experience in sales, marketing communications and government relations in the tech sector. He has led groundbreaking projects around the world in open source, Big Data social media research.

I have the privilege of moderating the debate.

Big Data – the process of analyzing massive amounts of electronic data and acting on it in real time – is both a massive opportunity and a cause of concern.

It can help governments and businesses improve efficiency in ways we could not have imagined 10 years ago. But it could also jeopardize the privacy of individuals and groups as governments, businesses, even criminals can collect information on us from our data trails.

Tully and Crouch will probe the opportunities and threats of Big Data, touching on such areas as data ownership, consent, protection and how to resolve the tension created by this new technology.

Big Data or Big Problems? Is organized by the Acadia Institute for Data Analytics.