Data Ethics: Students reflect on the sociopolitical dynamics of data ethics in a turbulent year

The second half of 2020 was, in a word, chaotic. On top of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States continued to confront its repugnant racial history after the murder of George Floyd in May and later voted out a president who attacked the country’s democratic institutions. Students in Ethics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Marcello Antosh’s Data Ethics course delved more deeply into these phenomena, completing semester-long research projects on the ways in which the pandemic, U.S. race relations, and divided democracy in the United States intersect with issues of data ethics.

In contrast to the hypervisibility of the pandemic and fractured democracy, many students in the course explored more subtle matters. The project’s roots stem from the unconscious and implicit biases that arise as a result of algorithms and programs that manage data, according to Antosh.

“Though humans don’t necessarily have biases in mind while writing these programs, they make choices that very often have implicit value assumptions at their basis. Just the choice of deciding what data to even look at can indirectly perpetuate or exacerbate underlying inequities in society,” Antosh said.

One student addressed the well-established, troubling trend of racial discrimination in facial recognition technologies. Sophomore Chanel Holston (COL ‘23) investigated the ways in which these technologies disproportionately disadvantage people of color, and she interviewed her father to complement her research.

“I talked about this idea of collective anxiety as another reason why these flawed facial recognition algorithms should be fixed,” Holston said. “I used the example of my father, for someone who was never an inmate or arrested. You still get this anxious feeling and this constant question: ‘Am I next?’”

Another student focused on the distinctive features of the messaging platform WhatsApp. Sophomore Sargun Kaur (SFS ‘23) analyzed the app’s forwarding feature and encryption of its messages, concluding that these make the app more conducive to the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Given a decreasing trust in institutions, WhatsApp’s potential as a source of misinformation is all the more destabilizing.

“Exploring the ethical challenges of the internet and technology today is very important, and it’s something that everyone should be asked to do. It opened up my mind in many ways as to how I’m interacting with different platforms,” Kaur added about the project.

At its core, the project invited research on a number of significant issues like racial inequity. However, such serious considerations also surface in more apparently trivial parts of daily life, and alumna Agnieszka Krotzer’s (SFS ‘20) project on dating apps exemplifies this notion.

“We are focusing on heavy ideas like misinformation and how it can affect political regimes; you normally do not think of something like a dating app. It is something that is very familiar to people, something whose stakes are much lower,” Antosh said about Krotzer’s project.

In comparing Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, Krotzer took a different approach to the project, examining the ethical implications of dating apps as well as the lack of transparency of the apps’ algorithms and terms of service. Given that people often choose partners with similar political views, Krotzer specifically mused on the potential for dating apps to exacerbate polarization by allowing users to remove people of a certain political affiliation from their feeds, therefore suppressing social cohesion by keeping people who subscribe to different politics separate from one another.

Antosh said he believes the assignment helped make the philosophy course more directly applicable to students’ lives and therefore more practical.

“Philosophy can be very abstract, and that can be useful in framing what the issues are. But when we deal with practical topics like designing algorithms or government regulation, if we stay in the abstract realm too much, it can seem pointless or ineffective in helping people to form their own opinions,” Antosh said.

As a result of this project, students utilized both abstract and practical perspectives to analyze issues in data ethics that are directly pertinent to their lives, and in discussing the project, students like Holston, Kaur, and Krotzer praised this aspect of the course as indispensable.