Big Data ethics

Abstract

The speed of development in Big Data and associated phenomena, such as social media, has surpassed the capacity of the average consumer to understand his or her actions and their knock-on effects. We are moving towards changes in how ethics has to be perceived: away from individual decisions with specific and knowable outcomes, towards actions by many unaware that they may have taken actions with unintended consequences for anyone. Responses will require a rethinking of ethical choices, the lack thereof and how this will guide scientists, governments, and corporate agencies in handling Big Data. This essay elaborates on the ways Big Data impacts on ethical conceptions.

Big Data-Driven Health Surveillance

“…Zwitter 2014;Swierstra and Rip 2007;Moor 2005). This matter becomes even more complicated when considering that such research does not only take place in university departments.…”

“…This is one of the main problems that much of big datadriven research is hesitant to foreground: the ethical and practical implications of such research are largely unclear. At the very least, individuals are exposed to uncertainties regarding how the data are used and what this might mean for them as stakeholders now and in the future (see also Zwitter 2014). As personal data are automatically retrieved on an immense scale, the implications of such approaches for users' autonomy, dignity and right to privacy need to be considered.…”

La investigación en comunicación con metodología BigData

“…Existe un creciente número de trabajos que se preguntan por la utilidad de las nuevas técnicas en diversas áreas científicas (Leonelli, 2014;Taylor, Schroeder y Meyer, 2014), tratan aspectos epistemológicos (Kitchin, 2014;Raghavan, 2014), metodológicos (Burrows y Savage, 2014; Murthy y Bowman, 2014) o éticos (Zwitter, 2014;Lyon, 2014;Gurevitch, 2014). Y algunos trabajos se ocupan específicamente de el impacto de su uso en el ámbito de la comunicación (Schroeder, 2014;Penney, 2014;D"Heer y Verdegem, 2014;Fischer, 2014), determinando la notoria significancia que está adquiriendo el tratamiento de grandes bases de datos con técnicas de análisis de contenido.…”

Big Data in Organizations and the Role of Human Resource Management

“…In 2011, for example, they introduced a feature that suggests search terms on the basis of the initial search word. People also change their search behavior (Lazonder et al 2000) over time and search engines are susceptible to manipulation to a certain degree (Zwitter 2014). Understanding and comprehending those influences is important, but it is crucial to mitigate those big data related risks.…”