People Analytics: Ethical

Considerations
Ethics in the News
What Technology Companies
Are Talking About
IBM Google
• https:// • https://
www.youtube.com/watch www.youtube.com/watch
?v=aGwYtUzMQUk ?v=gLHMhCtxEYE

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 Ethical Considerations
• Privacy issues – e.g. Hitachi Sensing Happiness

• Virtue ethics: Valuing people as unique individuals

rather than data points

• Justice: May change procedural and distributive

justice perceptions
– HR needs to intervene

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 Ethical Considerations
• Duty and categorical imperative:
– HR should not conduct research that would likely compromise applicants or
result in large numbers of employees being fired, or that would bring
general discredit or ridicule to the HR profession
– Would you want this particular action to become a universal law?

• Justice theory suggests that an action only be performed if the

worst off will be better off than they might be under an equal
distribution
– For example, such a perspective would be violated if we were to determine
who the star performers are but “laggards” are simply terminated, rather
than trained or redeployed.

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 Ethical Concerns

• Data Collection
• Data Storage
• Data Sharing, Reuse, Replicability
• Data Analysis
• Unknown and Emerging
 Data Collection

• Employment Discrimination Laws

– No discrimination on religious or other grounds

• European Data protection directive

– Consent needed, access to analysis and data anytime
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 Data Storage
• Improper Storage
• Data Security
• 3rd Party Storage
 Sharing, Reuse, Replicability

• Questions about ‘Public Data’

• Non-intrusive research
• Value of Data Reuse
– Frustration when attempting to reuse data
 Data Analysis
• Inherent bias in analytic techniques

• Assumptions and limitations of methods

• Interpretation of results is subjective

• Incomplete knowledge of methods

dangerous
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 Unknown and Emerging

“As we develop new methods and new

techniques and new types of research, new
potentials for harm, new ethical questions are
coming up for which we don’t have many
examples yet and people are not aware - the
unknown ‘gotchas’ that I worry about people
falling into.”
 More Issues
• When is privacy about a community, not just an
individual?

• Reuse restrictions

• Longitudinal consent

• Ethical but not legal responsibilities

• Variations in data privacy laws

 Guiding Principles
• States must protect against human rights abuses,
regardless of whether perpetrators are natural
persons or artificial entities;
• Corporations must respect human rights, both as a
matter of company policy and in their regular
business activities; and
• Governments and corporations both must provide a
remedy when human rights abuses do occur.
(United Nations, 2011)

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 Ethics in Research Data Project

How can infrastructures that exist around

technical researchers support the emerging
ethical issues in data research?

• Workshops
– Company policies
– Country laws
– Ethical considerations
 Sensitisation
• High-level framework
• Outline of situations where principles should
be applied
• Identification of key areas of variance in
privacy laws worldwide

Ecosystem to help researchers understand the

problems of big data!