Ethics and Data Science

Chapter 4. Data’s Day of Reckoning

Our lives are bathed in data: from recommendations about whom to “follow” or “friend” to data-driven autonomous vehicles. But in the past few years, it has become clear that the products and technologies we have created have been weaponized and used against us. Although we’ve benefited from the use of data in countless ways, it has also created a tension between individual privacy, public good, and corporate profits. Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (Broadway Books) and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality (Macmillan) document the many ways that data has been used to harm the broader population.

Data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and related technologies are now facing a day of reckoning. It is time for us to take responsibility for our creations. What does it mean to take responsibility for building, maintaining, and managing data, technologies, and services? Responsibility is inevitably tangled with the complex incentives that surround the creation of any product. These incentives have been front and center in the conversations around the roles that social networks have played in the 2016 US elections, recruitment of terrorists, and online harassment. It has become very clear that the incentives of the organizations that build and own data products haven’t aligned with the good of the people using those products.

These issues aren’t new to the consumer internet. Other fields have had their days of reckoning. ...