Abstract
Every form a user fills out, every click a user makes on a website, every comment or recommendation a user posts about a product creates a new data point that is being used by companies and researchers to better understand and potentially infer human behavior. In this chapter we highlight cases when companies and/or researchers stepped over the boundary of ethically reasonable uses of big data or manipulated individuals online without their expressed consent. We describe tools that members of the American public could use to improve the level of user privacy on the Internet and to gain more control over their data. Yet, recognizing the limits of individual protections, we also argue that the time has come to launch a public discussion about ethical uses of large-scale human behavioral data. We should develop guidelines and regulations that protect users while still allowing companies and researchers the ability to advance knowledge about human behavior in responsible ways.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by NSF CNS-1223825 and NSF IIS-1522745. The opinions and findings described in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Singh, L. (2016). Data Ethics—Attaining Personal Privacy on the Web. In: Collmann, J., Matei, S. (eds) Ethical Reasoning in Big Data. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28422-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28422-4_7
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