Database Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Data Science Ethics
and Privacy Concerns
“You already have zero privacy - get over it.”
- Scott McNealy,
Sun Microsystems
Few could miss the headlines about Facebook's infamous undisclosed January 2012
“mood experiment” on users. To recap, the study (published by researchers from Facebook,
Cornell, and the University of California in the March 2013
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences
) was designed to gage the social network's power to upset and/or excite
people. The guinea pigs in the study were some 700,000 Facebook members who received
News Feeds front-weighted with either positive or negative posts and images, this to see the
extent to which their emotions could be impacted. Problem: The guinea pigs were never in-
formed of their participation in the test.
In response to the uproar, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained: “This was part of
ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was: it was
poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset
you.” It seems necessary to point out here that “poorly communicated” is Facebook lingo
for “never communicated.”
A subsequent Revolution Analytics survey of 144 Data Scientists attending the annual
Joint Statistical Meetings of 2014 showed that a vast majority of Data Scientists and statist-
icians viewed the Facebook experiment as entirely unethical.
According to David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution Analytics, while
Data Scientists and statisticians working in the health sciences field already have a great
deal of regulation surrounding the way they collect and analyze data, tech and business in-
dustry standards and practices are “more opaque … there's this whole new Wild West … of
data coming from Internet applications, Internet services, the Internet of Things, where these
practices and procedures aren't really in place yet.”
Clearly, Big Data creates numerous opportunities for misuse. Many Data Scientists see
it as their job to create a rubric of ethical behavior in which their profession should place
