Transcript Ethics of Data Tagging

Ethics of Data Tagging:
A Case-Study of Racial Identifiers
Lane DesAutels, PhD
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Missouri Western State University
9/13/16
Big Data has Serious Ethical Implications:
• Data Collection
• Data Use/Exploitation
• Data Protection/Enforcement
• Data Transmission Exposure & Vulnerabilities
Ethics of Data Journeys
• How ought we to facilitate the movement of data?
• Central claim:
• How we tag data matters.
Outline
1. What is Data Tagging?
2. Ethical Implications of Data Tagging
3. Racial Identifiers as Moral Confounders
4. Lessons from Phronetic Social Science
What is Data Tagging?
• “the practice of creating and
managing labels (or ‘tags’) that
categorize content using simple
keywords”
(Getting 2007)
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/prevent-facebook-tagging/
http://thedigitalelevator.com/social-media/10-reasons-use-hashtags/
Data tagging in science
• Beyond the realm of social media and internet
advertising…
• data tagging has become vitally important for
data-intensive sciences
Why is data tagging vitally
important in these sciences?
• the data are incredibly immense in scope
• no researcher could possibly look at every data
point.
• So that data can be mined, searched, and accessed
by researchers.
Outline
1. What is Data Tagging
2. Ethical Implications of Data Tagging
3. Racial Identifiers as Moral Confounders
4. Lessons from Phronetic Social Science
Ethical Implications of Data
Tagging
• Access to digital information: less of a privilege and
more as a universal human right (Wagner 2012)
Argument
• If access to digital information is a moral obligation
owed to every person,
• and data tags affect whether and how this
information is accessible,
• then it would seem that data tagging has
tremendous moral import.
Life and Death Example
https://www.drugs.com/drug_interactions.php
Outline
1. What is Data Tagging
2. Ethical Implications of Data Tagging
3. Racial Identifiers as Moral Confounders
4. Lessons from Phronetic Social Science
Consider racial data tags
• Instances where content is categorized by labels
referring to individuals’ race
• Race: A group of people identified as distinct from
other groups because of supposed physical or
genetic traits shared by the group
(free dictionary)
Racial Identifiers as moral
confounders
• Thesis: racial tags present a moral quandary
On the one hand…
• Racial tags have the potential to help
• instigate social reforms
• E.g., by drawing attention to social inequality
• Furthermore…
• Information about race appears to be able to help
predict risk for certain disease
http://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/race-and-ethnicity-clues-to-your-heart-disease-risk
On the other hand
• Racial tags can lead to morally problematic results
Alt Right
• “Between 2000 and 2014, the White share of the
US population declined from 69.1% to 61.9%. In
other words, the non-white share rose from 30.9%
to 38.1%”
• “So while a hypothetical race-neutral white in 1990
had probably an 85-90% chance of randomly
marrying another white, now, his odds are maybe
75-80%”
•
http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2016/01/lies-damned-lies-and-racial-statistics.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-tags-black-people-as-gorillas-2015-7
More Generally
• there are some in social anthropology (e.g., Maglo
2011) who argue that
• racial identification tags are never morally
permissible on the grounds that they lend
authenticity to socially constructed and pernicious
race categories that we as a society would be
better without.
Confounding Moral Quandary
Racial Tags
Good
Bad
Draw attention to
inequality
Potential for harmful
mistakes
Are good predictors of risk
Perpetuate stereotypes
Outline
1. What is Data Tagging
2. Ethical Implications of Data Tagging
3. Racial Identifiers as Moral Confounders
4. Lessons from Phronetic Social Science
Lessons from Virtue Ethics
• Domain of ethical assessment
• Not individual actions or duties
• Virtuous character
• Courage, justice, temperance, humility, kindness,
charity, patience, chastity,… etc.
Prima Facie Difficulty
• Sometimes virtues point in different directions
• Justice vs. kindness
• Courage vs. temperance
The “Doctrine of the Unity of the
Virtues”
• Whoever has one virtue has them all (Socrates)
• “the key to understanding Socrates’ position is the
central role of wisdom among the virtues” (Brickhouse & Smith
1996, 311)
Phronetic social science
• Knowledge of the facts and risks
• Clarify/Make Explicit:
• values
• interests
• power relations
Conclusion: tagging data wisely
• Be aware:
• Who gains by tagging?
• Who has the potential to suffer?
• Are there power structures that would benefit?
Outline
1. What is Data Tagging
2. Ethical Implications of Data Tagging
3. Racial Identifiers as Moral Confounders
4. Lessons from Phronetic Social Science
• Thank you!
• [email protected]
References
• Getting, B 2007 What are “tags” and what is “tagging?”. Practical Ecommerce, 22
October, p. 1. Available at: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/589What-Are-%E2%80%9CTags%E2%80%9D-And-What-Is-%E2%80%9CTagging%E2%80%9D
• Brickhouse, T and Smith, N 1996 Socrates and the unity of the virtues. The Journal
of Ethics 1(4), pp. 311-324.
• Flybjerg, B 2008 "Making Sociology Matter: Phronetic Sociology as Public
Sociology." In Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ed., Public Sociology. Aalborg University
Press, 2008, pp. 77-117.
• Maglo, Koffi 2011 The case against biological realism about race: from Darwin to
the genomic era. Perspectives on Science 19(4), pp. 361-390.
• Mulshine, M 2015 A major flaw in Google’s Algorithm allegedly tagged two black
people’s faces with the word ‘gorillas’. Business Insider, 1 July, p. 1. Available at:
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-tags-black-people-as-gorillas-2015-7
• Plato The collected dialogues of Plato. Jowett, B (ed). Huntington Cairns.
• Wagner, A 2012 Is internet access a human right?. The Guardian, 11 January, p. 1.
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jan/11/is-internet-access-ahuman-right