ABSTRACT

This chapter provides employers with an introduction to the world of Big Data and what its arrival means for their daily activities. It summarizes Fair Credit Report Act obligations (FCRA) on employers that use consumer reports, summarizes recent FCRA trends in the Big Data context, and provides practical insights for mitigating the risks that have developed from those trends. Cognitive computing works by identifying associative connections between data points and reasoning from them. Historically, cognitive computing is an outgrowth of the broader field of Artificial Intelligence. Cognitive computing enhances Big Data analysis by unlocking large portions of the world's data and by providing a more sophisticated and dynamic means of analyzing it. One of the consequences of Big Data is that small differences between groups may be "statistically significant." The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 as amended by the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, poses special challenges for Big Data.