Big data and Belmont: On the ethics and research implications of consumer-based datasets

Abstract

Consumer-based datasets are the products of data brokerage firms that agglomerate millions of personal records on the adult US population. This big data commodity is purchased by both companies and individual clients for purposes such as marketing, risk prevention, and identity searches. The sheer magnitude and population coverage of available consumer-based datasets and the opacity of the business practices that create these datasets pose emergent ethical challenges within the computational social sciences that have begun to incorporate consumer-based datasets into empirical research. To directly engage with the core ethical debates around the use of consumer-based datasets within social science research, I first consider two case study applications of consumer-based dataset-based scholarship. I then focus on three primary ethical dilemmas within consumer-based datasets regarding human subject research, participant privacy, and informed consent in conversation with the principles of the seminal Belmont Report.

Visual digital data, ethical challenges, and psychological science.

“…Increasingly, there are commercial data broking companies that can provide such data as a paid for service. For those with the resources to outsource data collection, there are a range of ethical considerations based around trust in the ethics of data providers (Stewart, 2021). For researchers with the technical skills to acquire data directly, there are still important ethical challenges in relation to the researcher, the uploader, those captured in the images, and for the social media platform itself.…”

Digital Marketing in the Age of Iot: A Review of Trends and Impacts

“…Remy Stewart (2021) explores the ethical challenges within computational social sciences that incorporate consumer-based datasets into empirical research. The study engages with core ethical debates around the use of consumer-based datasets, focusing on human subject research, participant privacy, and informed consent.…”

Modeling COVID-19 with big mobility data: Surveillance and reaffirming the people in the data

“…This complexity challenges public health ethical considerations which are primarily derived from competing positions (in the Western tradition) including utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, solidarity-based approaches, and more praxis focused principles (Dawson and Jennings, 2012; Roberts and Reich, 2002; Upshur, 2002). Furthermore, the volume, variety, velocity of big data further challenges these conceptions and requires additional layering of ethical considerations specific to this data type (Stewart, 2021). The result is that current guidelines do not, cannot, adequately address the rapidly changing research/practice dynamics of big mobility data, particularly for something as entropic as a pandemic.…”