Ethics, its massive, it’s a word that is on everybody’s lips. It implies fairness and justice, equality. Ethics is – “the philosophical discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong”, so it intersects hugely with values and bias. Remember morals are defined by values and values are defined by bias. Understanding that explains why Data within a business is like a three-legged stool, last week we looked at one leg Data Governance, this week we cover Data Ethics and next week we will look at the final leg… Data Culture (how we talk about and understand our data within our organisation).
Data Governance covered what data can be collected, how it should be stored and where and lastly who can access it. Data Ethics focuses on the usage of what has been collected. How can we morally use data? Business morality is of course why we need to embrace Data Ethics. Let us start simply, if you are asked to work out if left-handed customers buy more products is that appropriate? Technically it is a simple measure to write within any analytics platform, we simply need to look at average sale value then apply it to left or right handedness of the customer. Wait, do we know what hand they use, is it in our database? Now you see how Data Governance and Data Ethics work together. Ethically how does that apply to our corporate values? It would be possible to ask handedness, but what benefit do you have from knowing the result? If we find out that left-handed customers average sale value is £100 and right-handed is £50 would that impact what we do? Remember that left and right handedness have an approximate 1:10 ratio, so the sales would equate to £100:£500. So, should we market specifically to the left-handed market?
Left and right-handedness is not something we would analyse, typically we look at Protected Characteristics and often attach too much value. Another core function of Data Ethics is to ensure that our analysis is hypothesis based rather than corelation based. All too often we blindly look for corelations and then assume that it is causal. Data Ethics ensures that we are analysing things in an appropriately and that there is a clear reasoning.
Data ethics covers why and what it is used for. There is no ethical reason to ask someone their age at a job interview. The adage “just because you can, it doesn’t make it right” springs to mind. Again, if you want the right person for the job, the right person could be any age – unless it is related to biological and physiological parameters. There is knowing your audience for the right reasons and knowing your audience. Once again, context is key, which is why data governance is such an important part of data ethics.
So here is a question that we would love to hear your views on. How do you balance Data Ethics and Data Governance within your organisation?
#geordielife #dataliteracy #dataethics
