Author: Ian McMahan
Publisher: Wired
Publication Year: 2018
Summary: The following article explains the potential ethical (or unethical) repercussions of GPS and biometric data from National Football League (NFL) players being made available to every team. Previously, this data was only available to the player and their team, but the author explains that in 2018, when this article was written, data was newly made available to every team in the league. This introduced ethical considerations in multiple facets. First, it reveals competitive advantages for teams with better or more mature analytics departments that can understand, analyze, and translate this data. Secondly, it begs the question of how much information is too much, and when does this wealth of knowledge become illegal and start to be considered cheating? Finally, it introduces a privacy issue because these are individual players’ (humans’) biometric data, which can now be viewed and used against them by their competitive adversaries. This does not even mention how their changes in speed, acceleration, etc. with age can be used to determine their value as a free agent when contract season rolls around. This article reveals the tradeoff of interesting and valuable information in return for some ethical questions.