After our meetup on Big Data and Ethics at DigitYser we held an executive Lunch with Michael Ekstrand to discuss some important, yet emerging issues related to current practices around data.
All participants were obviously mainly interested in dealing with how ethics will affect those practices and we agreed with Philippe Van Impe and Geert Verstraeten that we will address this topic in the upcoming data bootcamp organized by Digityser.
Michael made a point when he argued that all engineering specialties BUT data engineering included some form of ethics lesson. How can we expect future big data experts (engineers, architects, data scientists) to pay attention to ethics if they have no idea of what it is ?
To make it easier we have decided to set up a repository where we will document examples of bad practices around three steps of the Big Data process :
- data collection : how far do firms go to access personal data and how pervasive data collection can become
- data treatment : how data is manipulated and how unfair the data treatment (and the vision behind algorithms) can be
- objectives : what kind of unethical aims can be pursued by firms
If you have examples in mind or if you want to contibute to this collective effort, please get in touch with me or leave a comment on this article.
Image : shutterstock
