Ethical Considerations Beyond Data Science

On April 4, 2018, Mark Zuckerbug, the CEO of Facebook, attended a Congress ional hearing in which he apologized to the congress about the Facebook user data leakage issue. This issue has brought people’s attention on the ethical concerns over data usage.

Without any doubts, data can be used in various ways to make industries more efficient. User behavior data can be used to support growth hacking and user browsing data can be used for effective advertising. Moreover, companies can also use data to extract business insights for making better strategies. Without data, our strategies and assumptions cannot be proved and our world would be full of uncetainties.

However, extensive data usage brings up new problems that we have never encountered before. One major issue is the privacy and ethical concerns over the usage of user data. For instance, it is true that companies can make more profit by designing effective advertisement using the user browsing data, however, as browsing history can be considered as highly personal and private, the usage of that data violates user privacy rights. Even though techniques can be applied in order to erase the sensitive part of data, user might still feel that their rights have been offended.

In the era of data explosion, it is of vital importance that we use data in good and acceptable ways. As data science is still a relatively young subject, we are still exploring a way to balance data usage and privacy concerns. Only then can data truly contributes to the thrive of our society.