From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

Ethical foundations: Part 3

From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

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Ethical foundations: Part 3

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- So let's talk a minute about how this applies to data. Well if ethics is the study of human well-being, data ethics, we get a nice tidy definition is just the study of how data affects human well-being. And let me tell you, it affects human well-being in a lot of positive ways and a lot of negative ways. We can talk about this from a process side, data is collected, stored, processed, visualized, used in decision making, and it turns out that in each of those five steps, there's specific things to talk about, about how human well-being is affected either positively or negatively. We can also talk about this from the perspective of who is being affected. We can talk about individuals, we'll do that in module two, we can talk about groups and societies and citizens, that's what we're going to do in mod three. We can also talk about customers, employees, and businesses, this is what we'll do in mod four. There's all these dimensions all these groups that are affected in different ways by the use of data, their well-being is affected and that's what makes it ethical. Now, a previous video we had talked about how data is actually a very old thing, it just means recorded facts, so markings on a cave wall count as data. But now we're living in this age of big data, so whatever this data ethics thing was, that data ethics has existed as long as data has. Now all those problems are still with it but because data is big, there's more problems, and they're also sometimes more complicated. So in this course, we want to talk about some of those issues.

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