Big Data Analytics A question of ethics
Date posted
11 February 2016
Reading time
8 Minutes
Big Data Analytics A question of ethics
Having been a part of Kainos' Big data & analytics practice for almost a year and a half now has raised many questions in my head. Not least because it is an emerging area of technology, growing so rapidly that there are new programming models, frameworks and data stores seemingly every other week! With these rapidly evolving technologies and more precedence than ever being placed on big data and analytics, it raises the issue of ethics.
Ethics is defined by Oxford dictionaries as 'moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity'. Technology and by extension big data and are ethically neutral, how we utilise big data is not! When I search Google for more information on big data ethics does this give Google the right to try to sell me O'Reilly's newest 'Ethics of Big Data' book? (*Caveat - This is a great book and if you're interested in the topic, it definitely deserves a read). Should it allow them to infer that I'm a software engineer who might like to attend a conference with a big data ethics stream? How does a company or an organisation who intends to use big data analytics to enhance their operations know that their utilisation of the technology is ethical?
Much research into the topic of ethical big data as surfaced four common themes which could be used to characterise the issue.
- Identity
- Is offline existence identical to online existence?
- Ownership
- What does it mean to own data about ourselves?
- Privacy
- Who should control access to data about you?
- Reputation
- How can we determine what is trustworthy?