Recently, Bloomberg posted an opinion piece about data ethics. How do we as a community handle data ethically? We know that the amount of data created each day will only continue to increase. What does responsible data sharing and use look like ‒ for a data scientist, a parent, or a business? How are our socioeconomic structures and methods of interaction shaping behavior? How might we ensure that our technologies and practices are fair and unbiased? These questions are only going to get harder to answer.
One idea that is proposed in the article is to have a “Hippocratic Oath” for data scientists. “Just as medical professionals pledge to do no harm, individuals working with data should sign and abide by one or a set of pledges, manifestos, principles, or codes of conduct… At Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange (D4GX) in New York City on Sunday, September 24th, 2017, the company announced a partnership with Data for Democracy and BrightHive to bring the data science community together to explore this very topic. More than 100 volunteers from universities, nonprofits, local and federal government agencies, and tech companies participated, drafting a set of guiding principles that could be adopted as a code of ethics.”
The article emphasizes that we should be having these conversations early and often and bringing in a diverse range of perspectives. “We should be having these conversations not just at academic conferences and in tech and ethics courses, but around dinner tables, everywhere.”
See the full article to learn more.
