Asking the Right Questions: Big Data and Civil Rights
Alastair Croll has written a thought-provoking article, Big data is our generation’s civil rights issue, and we don’t know it. His basic argument is that the new economics of collecting and analyzing data has led to a change in how it is used. Once it was expensive to collect, so only data needed to answer particular questions was collected. Today it is cheap to collect, so it can be collected first and then analyzed – “we collect first and ask questions later”. This means that the questions asked can be very different from the questions the data seem to be about, and in many cases they can be problematic.
Read more: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/08/asking-the-right-questions-big-data-and-civil-rights/
Curated by Shankar Gopidas, Sam Kumarsamy and Louie Yan, the Tap the 90 blog delivers information on the business, technology and science of big data analytics. Check us out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!
16 August 2012: Practical Ethics
Asking the Right Questions: Big Data and Civil Rights
Alastair Croll has written a thought-provoking article, Big data is our generation’s civil rights issue, and we don’t know it. His basic argument is that the new economics of collecting and analyzing data has led to a change in how it is used. Once it was expensive to collect, so only data needed to answer particular questions was collected. Today it is cheap to collect, so it can be collected first and then analyzed – “we collect first and ask questions later”. This means that the questions asked can be very different from the questions the data seem to be about, and in many cases they can be problematic.
Read more: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/08/asking-the-right-questions-big-data-and-civil-rights/
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Curated by Shankar Gopidas, Sam Kumarsamy and Louie Yan, the Tap the 90 blog delivers information on the business, technology and science of big data analytics. Check us out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!
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