Show Me Your Data and I’ll Tell You Who You Are

Sandra Wachter – Oxford Internet Institute

The ethical and legal issues around even relatively straightforward objectively factual personal data are complicated enough. But they seem simple beside the further complexity brought in by inferences derived from that data. Inferences are not new, of course: human beings have been drawing inferences about each other long before they had the assistance of machines. But as in other area, big data makes a big difference.

Inferences are tricky for several reasons. The ownership of an inference is clearly something different from ownership of the information from which the inference is drawn (even supposing that it is meaningful to talk about ownership in this context at all). An inference is often a propensity, which can be wrong without being falsifiable – ‘people who do x tend to like y‘ may remain true even I do x and don’t like y. And all that gets even more tricky over time – ‘people who do x tend to become y in later life’ can’t even be denied or contradicted at the individual level.

This lecture explores those questions and more, examining them at the intersection of law, technology and ethics – and then asks what rights we, as individuals, should have about the inferences which are made about us.

The same arguments are also explored in a blog post written by Wachter with her collaborator Brent Mittelstadt and in very much more detail in an academic paper, also written with Mittelstadt.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.