Ethical Treatment of Big Data

Ethical Treatment of Big Data

"Analytics holds dramatic potential to fuel innovation and economic growth. To realize that potential it will be necessary to address the data protection and privacy issues that the use of analytics raises. The risks to individual privacy must be solved so organizations will be able to use technologies and new sources of data for analytics robustly and with confidence. The Centre's project will create the clear guidance that mitigates against the risks raised by analytics but does not impede their use," -Paula Bruening, Vice President Global Public Policy for the Centre for Information Policy Leadership.

Big data and the use of analytics are a rising trend within the business world. "$34 billion dollars is estimated to be spent on information technology worldwide focused on big data and analytics." There is a reason for those expenses; the inherent value of information.

Businesses today use big data for a plethora of reasons, but it all comes down to seeing the information of a company and its employees and using that to improve areas of the business. Monitoring employee production, sales information, employee turnover, etc. are all uses of big data throughout the corporate landscape. Using reporting and analytical programs, companies can take that data and adjust their compensation, hiring rates, pricing structure, and so much more. In seeing all this information, at some point businesses will begin to cross a line of privacy concern and ethics. As technology is becoming more prevalent to the everyday worker and monitoring software is able to see more and more of an employee's personal information, when does big data become more of a liability within the corporate environment. A happy work-life balance is integral for each and every employee, but limiting their privileges and monitoring their every move can be stifling. Opening the door to allow these types of recreation could cause drops in production and so they must be monitored. One can only monitor so much within the digital frontier though. Now that people are even more "plugged in", at what point are businesses going too far? Lines are starting to blur, and companies are going to whatever lengths possible to make sure their employees are working efficiently and diligently. But when does privacy factor in and what is going to change to stop these problems arising?

"Big data itself, like all technology, is ethically neutral. The use of big data, however, is not. While the ethics involved are abstract concepts, they can have very real-world implications. The goal is to develop better ways and means to engage in intentional ethical inquiry to inform and align our actions with our values." It is a company's ways in interpreting this data and their subsequent actions that makes big data and analytics become a gray area for ethical and privacy concerns. Having the ability to see a great deal of information about a possible future employee or even a current employee can be a very productive toolset, but can the data that is seen really show the true worker in a man or woman, and in using that data, are you stifling the creative freedom that naturally exists within the everyday workforce.

Big data does not only affect a company's workforce, but also has affected customer relations within the retail world. Target used data analytics related to purchase patterns to determine that a young woman was highly likely to be pregnant, and then mailed her flyers with baby and pregnancy merchandize highlighted. She had not revealed her pregnancy to Target, nor to her father. Data analytics was able to track her shopping patterns and predict she was pregnant. It caused her family a somewhat surprising revelation and may have ruined a special moment for her. The Target incident has now become the banner that represents the troubling downside of big-data and data analytics.

It is not just data analytics related to retail that is disturbing privacy activists. The human resources departments of many companies are using data analytics in the hiring process. Job applicants offer a lot of set data asked by potential employers, but in this the era of social media, there is much more applicant data available to employers online. Due to big data, a potential