"Proprietary data hoarding is a massive, underappreciated public health failure Worsham described how researchers trying to understand traffic fatalities are repeatedly blocked from accessing telematics data held by automakers, insurers, and tech companies, even when filing FOIA requests: 'We asked multiple times for data from the federal government and we'll get FOIA requests denied on absurd grounds. There's plenty of data out there that if it was available to researchers like us, we could do tremendous public health research and we can't.' The practical implication extends well beyond medicine: in any domain where private companies hold behavioral data that affects public outcomes — workplace safety, financial fraud, urban planning — the gap between what is knowable and what is actually studied is enormous, and closing that gap requires deliberate policy pressure, not just better analytical methods. Source: Chris Worsham, Freakonomics Radio, Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities"