On 10 June, 2016, I will be giving a keynote talk at the Data Ethics Workshop, hosted by the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University in the UK. I look forward to meeting some of the great thinkers in this field from the other side of the pond, and learning more about the different data ethics landscape in the EU.
Speaker: Jake Metcalf
Institution: Data and Society Institute and Founding Partner, Ethical Resolve
Title: Data subjectivity: responding to emerging forms of research and research subjects
Abstract: There are significant disjunctions between the established norms and practices of human- subjects research protections and the emerging research methods and infrastructures at the heart of data science and the internet economy. For example, long-standing research ethics regulations typically exempt from further review research projects that utilize pre-existing and/or public datasets, such as most data science research. This was once a sound assumption because such research does not require additional intervention into a person’s life or body, and the ‘publicness’ of the data meant all informational or privacy harms had already occurred. However, because big data enables datasets to be (at least in theory) widely networked, continually updated, infinitely repurposable and indefinitely stored, this assumption is no longer sound—big data allows potential harms to become networked, distributed and temporally stretched such that potential harms can take place far outside of the parameters of the research. Familiar protections for research subjects need rethinking in light of these changes to scientific practices. In this talk I will discuss how a historicization of ‘human subjects’ in research enables us to critically interrogate an emerging form of research subjectivity in response to the changing conditions of data-driven research. I will ask how data scientists, practitioners, policy-makers and ethicists might account for the emerging interests and concerns of ‘data subjects,’ particularly in light of proposed changes to research ethics regulations in the U.S.