Balancing Privacy With Data Sharing for the Public Good; The New York Times, February 19, 2021

 David Deming, The New York Times; Balancing Privacy With Data Sharing for the Public Good

"Governments and technology companies are increasingly collecting vast amounts of personal data, prompting new laws, myriad investigations and calls for stricter regulation to protect individual privacy.

Yet despite these issues, economics tells us that society needs more data sharing rather than less, because the benefits of publicly available data often outweigh the costs. Public access to sensitive health records sped up the development of lifesaving medical treatments like the messenger-RNA coronavirus vaccinesproduced by Moderna and Pfizer. Better economic data could vastly improve policy responses to the next crisis."