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Big Data Ethics

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Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics

Synonyms

Mediated forms of information; Multiple forms of technology; Relevant categories of ethical consequences; Various forms of technology

Introduction

The gathering, use, and analysis of data has become a huge enterprise, with every field benefiting from the identification of key patterns, providing recommendations, and pioneering innovations, that would not have been possible, otherwise. As a result, the value of data has been heralded as the new oil and the data industry is set to continue growing into the future. This has come from larger, richer, faster, and more effective forms of data and the tools that we have at hand to analyze it. This transformation has taken place, whereby we can capitalize on the massive amounts of data generated by new technologies like smartphones, CCTVs, social media platforms, and smartwatches. This has been named the “Big Data Revolution” (Richards and King 2014), or more skeptically, “the surveillance economy” (Zuboff 2015). It has brought...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Chilling effect” here refers to a negative feeling that a person experience when being watched or surveilled. It can involve self-censorship, self-restraint, or silence effects to the people experiencing it.

  2. 2.

    Uber uses information about your battery status, weather, day (holidays), history, location, time of day, or how much rush are you in (if an individual can wait around 15 minutes the price can be lower).

  3. 3.

    Sometimes also simply referred to as “data ethics,” or broadly categorized as a form of information ethics.

References

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Correspondence to Mark Ryan .

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Ryan, M., Fernandez Inguanzo, A. (2021). Big Data Ethics. In: Poff, D.C., Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_1262-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_1262-1

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