If Spider-Man had worked in the booming data analytics field, Uncle Ben probably would have told him that “with big data comes big responsibility.” While that might resonate with many who manage big data, it is less intuitive what exactly this responsibility is.
Barely a week goes by without a story about the pitfalls of big data. However, the security breaches at Google and Facebook that expose user profiles to unauthorized parties are not the most complex ethical problems companies face. What creates greater challenges is the specific way data is gathered and used: Organizations combine vast amounts of information from several sources — some public, some proprietary, some from human activity, some from devices — to gain unique insights about human behavior and decisionmaking. Sometimes the potential consequences of such combinations are surprising and unexpected and may not even result from decisions by humans, but rather from artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and automated processes.
So how can we begin to identify the ethical issues in big data and the appropriate ways to deal with them? At a basic level, having access to data about human behavior shifts the power dynamic between the individual and the Organization that has this data, regardless of whether that data was given freely or collected by observation without consent. If data analysis allows a company to predict how people vote, date, choose what to buy, etc., they can use this insight to influence those behaviors. This is what makes big data incredibly valuable but at the same time makes individuals vulnerable. From an ethical perspective, such vulnerability creates a duty to act with a higher standard of care because the vulnerable person has limited ability and power to control the situation. Therefore, companies should take additional steps to evaluate potential harms to vulnerable individuals whose data is used and consider ways harms can be mitigated, giving people more control over what happens with their information or at the very least informing them about potential dangers they are exposed to.
Organizations may know more about you than you do
When organizations essentially reconstitute a person from various data sources, they might gain more insight into that person’s behavior than that person knows about themselves. Thus, it becomes important to clearly consider the motives and use of such insights because the potential for manipulation is great. For example, I may not know that I react to certain messages in a specific way. Consequently, I have no way of consciously putting such messages into context to help me maintain control over my choices. Someone else is essentially controlling me and I lose my autonomy and free will. Reflecting carefully about the motives behind the use of big data is quite tricky though.
