Ethics

Ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness or specific virtues.

Data ethics

Data ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that dictate how data is collected, shared, and used.

There are lots of different aspects of data ethics but we'll cover six:

  • ownership
  • transaction transparency
  • consent
  • currency
  • privacy
  • openness

Ownership

It's individuals who own the raw data they provide, and they have primary control over its usage, how it's processed and how it's shared.

Transaction transparency

All data processing activities and algorithms should be completely explainable and understood by the individual who provides their data.

Consent

This is an individual's right to know explicit details about how and why their data will be used before agreeing to provide it.

Currency

Individuals should be aware of financial transactions resulting from the use of their personal data and the scale of these transactions.

Privacy

Privacy means preserving a data subject's information and activity any time a data transaction occurs.

This is sometimes called information privacy or data protection.

Data anonymization

Personally identifiable information, or PII, is information that can be used by itself or with other data to track down a person's identity.

Data anonymization is the process of protecting people's private or sensitive data by eliminating that kind of information.

Typically, data anonymization involves blanking, hashing, or masking personal information.

A data analyst removes personally identifying information from a dataset.

Openness

Openness refers to free access, usage and sharing of data.

  • Open data must be available as a whole, preferably by downloading over the Internet in a convenient and modifiable form.

  • Open data must be provided under terms that allow reuse and redistribution including the ability to use it with other datasets.

  • Allow universal participation so that anyone can use, reuse, and redistribute the data.

The advantage is

  • Credible databases can be used more widely. More importantly, all of that good data can be leveraged, shared, and combined with other data.

Interoperability

Interoperability is key to open data's success.

Interoperability is the ability of data systems and services to openly connect and share data.