Author: Jennifer Priestly
Publisher: SAS Users
Publication Year: 2018
Summary: The following video discusses how the data ecosystem is evolving. Data used to be small, structured, and static. Then it became large, unstructured, and in motion. Now it is massive, integrated, and dynamic. The issues related to ethics are much more complex than they used to be. Why do data scientists need to understand ethics? Well, a few people can cause a great deal of harm. There was a breach with Yahoo that released data on 3 billion users in 2013. This brings up an ethical question: should researchers utilize hacked datasets that were made public? Another issue is the lack of consent. There are so many experiments on users without their consent, for example, the emotion-contagion experiment through Facebook. The thing is that digital footprints are highly unregulated. Companies can act within legal compliance while still breaking the spirit of the law, for example, Target marketing pregnancy materials. There is a fine line between what you can do and what you should do and because digital footprints are unregulated, there is a lot you can but should not do. Another issue is unknowables. Will this algorithm do what you think it will do? Algorithms are biased by humans and can be described in three ways: pre-existing, technical, and emergent. Unknowables, like unpredicted correlations, are really disturbing. Unfortunately, algorithms are far ahead of where ethical conversations are.
