<Are Tech Industry Leaders and Fictional Dinosaur Scientists One and the Same?> 2.0
“Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park (1993).
This quote from the hit techno-thriller Jurassic Park still applies today. But to silicon valley. Big data optimists and big tech operators are rushing to use large swaths of social media data, but they’re not stopping to ask whether they should. Large social media datasets from sites like Twitter and Reddit are readily available to researchers with minimal obstacles, but are there ethical barriers yet to be considered? I would argue that big data is the new Jurassic Park in regards to tech ethics, and maybe we ought to think twice before forging ahead on this new technical frontier.
In Critical Questions for Big Data, Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford argue, “just because [data] is accessible does not make it ethical”. Here they point out many great critiques of big data and in particular the usage of social media data. They brought up a Harvard study using Facebook data that claimed users’ data would be anonymous, but other researchers quickly discovered that it was very easy to de-anonymize these users which compromised the privacy of their participants.
Here is a clear example of a breach in personal privacy ethics, which can be seen as analogous to Jurassic Park’s breach of safety ethics. In the movie, genetic scientists rushed into creating new life from old dinosaur DNA and created a theme park around these carnivorous creatures without contemplating the considerable safety risks of doing so. In both situations (although one hypothetical) there is an intense optimism in new technology that leads researchers to go beyond ethical standards. Our new realm of big data is acting as a sort of virtual Jurassic Park where tech users are comparable to the helpless tourists, and we are unknowing victims of hungry dinosaurs that are secretly analyzing our data.
This is a new ethics problem that the tech industry will have to balance in the upcoming years. From here, I think our modern day dinosaur scientists could make many improvements. To mitigate ethical concerns, there could be more boundaries to access these large datasets. Sites that host these datasets could make it clear that public content that is posted could be used in various studies out of context. As well, publishers of these sorts of data could verify the anonymity of its research participants to avoid any scandal like the Facebook study. Many different facets of the industry can change to mitigate these ethical risks, and then hopefully, we won’t all be eaten by dinosaurs.
