From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

Law, analytics, and society

From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

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Law, analytics, and society

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- Law tells a story of civil society through rules that govern the rights and responsibilities of individuals, organizations, and governments. In a later video, we will examine sources of law, or where the law comes from. But for now, let's consider the role of law in society and its relationship with technology. The rules of law of a society reflect its values. For example, the European Union, in its soon-to-be-implemented GDPR, reveals that it values individual privacy. The US Constitution's First Amendment reveals that America values free speech. One of our first themes for the course is that law is territorial. It's confined to the territory or the place that created it. Like an old-school, hardbound textbook, the law's story is confined to the geographical boundaries of the nation that wrote it. This simple concept, territoriality, adds complexity for organizations that operate in more than one nation because they must comply with new and sometimes conflicting legal obligations from one nation to another. It adds even more complexity when operations are computer driven and internet transmitted. Law likes what is physical and present within boundaries of states, regions, and nations. It likes less what is intangible, such as that which is digital. So, the relationship between law and technology starts off rocky. Intensifying this misalignment is the fact that technology evolves at a rapid pace. Law, on the other hand, moves as slow as a snail. It is always catching up to technology. In June of this year, Brad Smith, president and chief legal counsel of Microsoft, noted this relationship in a talk referencing a US law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or the ECPA. This law was passed by congress in 1986, during the age of police wiretapping. This was also the age of the historical relic, the phone booth. In an ongoing struggle, courts have considered the privacy protections of the ECPA in evolving needs of law enforcement to access communications of non-US persons stored overseas by corporations. It's a misfit, but it's a great example of the struggle to take antiquated law and apply it to modern technologies. This leads to our second theme, the strange relationship between law, data analytics, and AI. Like law, data tells stories. The issue is that there is little, if any, law to regulate how the data is collected, managed, shared, and used for the story. We will see many example in our course of how some extraordinarily brilliant researchers are thinking about how existing law may apply to rapidly evolving technology, or what new laws we need to set right this relationship. Our last course theme to consider at the outset is the legal tension that exists in this space with respect to human rights and organizational rights. There are many organizational players to consider that engage human data in different contexts, creating legal questions almost at every turn. For example, does a social media organization that has access to a person's shared information have the right to define the identity of that person? Who controls human autonomy, human beings or data owners? With respect to issues of bias, if a person believes he was discriminated against as a result of algorithmic failure, will the law demand transparency of that algorithm to prevent future bias, or will the organization's intellectual property rights in the algorithm win?

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