1. Ethics and Politics of Computational Social Science
Joy Rohde
Associate Professor, Public Policy and History
and Interim Director,
Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program

2. Roadmap You should care about big data ethics
Big data poses new and challenging problems for research
Privacy, autonomy (consent), justice and fairness
Resources to learn more

3. Bigness and potential harm
Volume
Data are people…
Variety and granularity
who can be identified, stigmatized…
Durability
for a long time…
Velocity
quickly and widely.

4. Potential for harm
“The relative ease in engaging multitudes of distributed human subjects (or data about them) through intermediating systems speeds the potential for harms to arise, and extends the range of stakeholders who may be impacted.”
D. Dittrich and E. Kenneally, "The Menlo Report: Ethical Principles Guiding Information and Communication Technology Research," Tech. rep., U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Aug 2012.

5. Privacy Deidentification is not foolproof
“There is no way to make personal information in databases fully anonymous” (National Research Council, 2008).
Privacy matters for specific reasons that deserve protection:
Freedom of thought and expression
Protect vulnerable and stigmatized individuals and groups
Support socially valuable institutions

6. How can we think about privacy?
Situational and contextual rather than public/private binary
Right to privacy “is neither the right to secrecy nor a right to control but a right to appropriate flow of personal information.”
Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (2010)

7. Autonomy
Informed consent?
Is it feasible?
When is it non-coerced?

8. Digital Ethical Reasoning
Is not a box to check
Is contextual, ongoing, iterative
Matters because data are people and research with them affects their chances in life

9. Getting Started
Association of Internet Researchers ethics resources,
S. Barocas and d. boyd, “Engaging the ethics of data science in practice,” Communications of the ACM 60 (11),
M. C. Benigni et al. “Online extremism and communities that sustain it,” PLoS One 12.2 (2017).
d. boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” Information, Communication, and Society 15 (2012):
J. Lane, et al., Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good (2014).