The ethics of big data: A council forms to help researchers avoid pratfalls by Jordan Novet.
From the post:
Big data isn’t just something for tech companies to talk about. Researchers and academics are forming a council to analyze the hot technology category from legal, ethical, and political angles.
The researchers decided to create the council in response to a request from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for “innovation projects” involving big data.
The Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society will convene for the first time next year, with some level of participation from the NSF. Alongside Microsoft researchers Kate Crawford and Danah Boyd, two computer-science-savvy professors will co-direct the council: Geoffrey Bowker from the University of California, Irvine, and Helen Nissenbaum of New York University.
…
Through “public commentary, events, white papers, and direct engagement with data analytics projects,” the council will “address issues such as security, privacy, equality, and access in order to help guard against the repetition of known mistakes and inadequate preparation,” according to a fact sheet the White House released on Tuesday.
“We’re doing all of these major investments in next-generation internet (projects), in big data,” Fen Zhao, an NSF staff associate, told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “How do we in the research-and-development phase make sure they’re aware and cognizant of any issues that may come up?”
Odd that I should encounter this just after seeing the latest NSA surveillance news.
Everyone cites the Tuskegee syphilis study as an example of research with ethical lapses.
Tuskegee is only one of many ethical lapses in American history. I think hounding native Americans to near extermination would make a list of moral lapses. But, that was more application than research.
It doesn’t require training in ethics to know Tuskegee and the treatment of native Americans were wrong.
And whatever “ethics” come out of this study are likely to resemble the definition of a prisoner of war as defined in Geneva Convention (III), Article 4(a)(2)
(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions: (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
That may seem neutral on its face, but it’s fair to say that major nation states and not groups that have differences with them are likely to meet those requirements.
In fact, the Laws of War Deskbook argues in part that members of the Taliban had no distinctive uniforms and thus no POW status. (At page 79, footnote 31.)
The point being discussion of ethics should be in concrete cases, so we can judge who will win and who will lose.
Otherwise you will have general principles of ethics that favor the rule makers.
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