Author: Edmund G. Howe, Falicia Elenberg
Publisher: Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience
Publication Year: 2020
Summary: The following paper discusses how Big Data is becoming a larger field within the world of data science as more and more information is collected on people. This paper uses the field of medicine as an example but the ethical concepts raised in this paper can be generalized to the area of Big Data more broadly. The 3 concepts are 1). Respecting people’s autonomy, 2). Achieving equity, and 3). Protecting privacy. A major takeaway is that since Big Data uses information from many different sources, people likely do not know what information of theirs is considered public or private. Laws concerning consent are vague when relating to the line between what is public and private, and this paper suggests offering warnings on social media and websites about information seen as public and the ways in which it might be used. In addition, data trained on biased data sets may benefit one group of people and cause harm to others. The paper proposes that additional safeguards and data may need to be collected to safeguard against potential biases in advance of data collection even if it may cost more money. Overall, it is extremely important to ensure that people understand the risk they may be facing when having tons of data collected on them in advance.