Each of us exists as a summation of buying habits, preferences and demographics stored in hundred if not thousands of Internet information databases. Those “meta-selves” are great when they predict the coupons we need or help us get a deal on an upcoming golf trip, but increasingly such collections of data—and the predictive technologies they’re attached to—hold the capacity for unethical or potentially damaging decision making. The developing legal field of “data ethics” hopes to stop that possibility from manifesting in our day to day.
“Data ethics is a discipline within data science that is concerned with the use and fairness of data. Analytics are always including and excluding people. Any time that happens it is ripe for ethical consideration,” explained Bennett Borden, who was recently named chief data scientist of Drinker Biddle and Reath.
