Big Data’s Dangerous New Era of Discrimination by Michael Schrage.
From the post:
Congratulations. You bought into Big Data and it’s paying off Big Time. You slice, dice, parse and process every screen-stroke, clickstream, Like, tweet and touch point that matters to your enterprise. You now know exactly who your best — and worst — customers, clients, employees and partners are. Knowledge is power. But what kind of power does all that knowledge buy?
Big Data creates Big Dilemmas. Greater knowledge of customers creates new potential and power to discriminate. Big Data — and its associated analytics — dramatically increase both the dimensionality and degrees of freedom for detailed discrimination. So where, in your corporate culture and strategy, does value-added personalization and segmentation end and harmful discrimination begin?
If you credit Robert Jackall’s Moral mazes : the world of corporate managers, Oxford, 1988, moral issues are bracketed in favor of pragmatism and group loyalty.
There was no shortage of government or corporate scandals running up to 1988 and there has been no shortage since then that fit well into Jackdall’s framework.
An evil doer may start a wrongful act but a mass scandal requires non-objection if not active assistance from a multitude that knows wrong doing is afoot.
Unlike Michael, I don’t think management will be interested in “fairly transparent” and/or “transparently fair” algorithms and analytics. Unless that serves some other goal or purpose of the organization.