Big Data questions

The White House just released its Big Data report, finishing their 90-day big data review which involved input from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology as well as surveying the public. The review grapples with issues like discrimination, privacy, and power asymmetry, which certainly feed back into ethics. The results show that the American public is very concerned about transparency and oversight on practices involving their data; as the report shows, even where people were least worried (collection of location data) a majority of them were still “very much” concerned.

I certainly fall on the extremely concerned end of the spectrum. Many of these issues involve knock-on effects which are difficult for the average person to understand, such as how similarity analysis can de-anonymize data. These problems go back a long ways; I remember the furor around the“anonymous” search logs that AOL Research leaked in 2006. These days, data researchers have gone so far as to rigorously prove that supposedly-anonymous datasets with specific properties can bereliably de-anonymized.

It's also interesting to see that the report focuses on how broken our current expectations for privacy are, and also raises concerns about how long-running assumptions about how personal information is used in the marketplace are going to be overrun by the possibilities of big data analytics. As a non-expert, I don't feel informed enough to weigh in on their recommended policy framework for privacy and big data, but it's clear that some big ethical questions about information science are being addressed and formulated into law for the first time, to fill various policy vacuums.

There are many complex issues involved. The push-and-pull between law enforcement and our private lives is a strange and obvious ethical quandary; but the report also touches on smaller, trickier questions involving ethics. It questions things such as how we should evaluate government use of commercial data to ensure consistency with our national values and civil liberties. It is clear that the intersection between information technology and ethics is only going to grow more tangled as more of our lives become integrated with data-driven systems.

Here's a Danah Boyd talk from 2012 - she was one of the researchers involved, and has been thinking about privacy and big data for a good long while: