Week 6 – 8 – Freeform KIPP Blog Post – Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023)

In the course Insights Through Data (ITD), we discussed the topic of data ethics. When conducting research and handling data, ethics is one of the most important areas to think about. In the group breakouts, we were asked to consider if something is legal, does that make it ethical? Our group said no, as did all the others. We then spoke about That got me thinking about the barriers to obtaining representative data. Things like algorithmic biases were also discussed in the Exclusion and Inequality intensives, so this is a theme that I expect to come up in a lot of other courses during this programme.

In the area I’m interested in for the project, I know that obtaining data from food retailers is going to be nearly impossible. It’s in their best interests to keep that kind of information confidential as they are in a competitive space. On the other side, obtaining data about consumers is also going to be difficult. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, Wikileaks and the “accept cookies” message that pops up when I want to use a website all match up with the terms of “transparency”, “openness”, “ownership” and “privacy” that came up in ITD.

The services and platforms that we use for every day life have access to sensitive information about our habits. Like our locations and the things we spend money on. So to have ownership over our own data, and have privacy and have the companies that have this data tell us that they are transparent and open about their practices feels good. however, in many countries it is a legal imperative to have these privacy policies and give customers/consumers the option to choose if they want to share their data or not. We know that the big companies like Facebook can simply buy their way around some laws. On top of that, a lot of the time we aren’t aware that we are giving our data up. So they may be following the law, but they also may be behaving unethically at the same time.

In working on the project I want to think more about how I can be ethical about handling sensitive data like consumer habits, or household data or food retail data. I want ot make sure that the rules I follow are actually ethical so as not to go against personal principles.