Big Data Ethics: A Life Cycle Perspective

Abstract

The transformative potential of big data has attracted considerable academic attention in the last two decades, focusing not only on developments in the private sector, but also on big data’s impact on various aspects of governance and public policy. As this special issue demonstrates, big data analytics are also becoming more widely used in the legal domain – a development that raises new ethical questions and concerns. In the legal context, key concerns have to do with judicial and legal principles and can be a lot more controversial than in contexts where model performance is the key (or perhaps the only) relevant metric. This article explores how the use of big data analytics in the legal domain raises moral questions, looking closely at five illustrative cases and doing so in a structured systematic way. Our approach here is informed by the fact that many ethically significant decisions arise either before analysis, when collecting, storing, and aggregating data, or after analysis, when results are communicated, decisions are reached and lessons are learned. Thus, examining the morality of big data use in a systematic way requires that we include and consider the moral dimensions of all stages of the process, for which we utilise the ‘data life cycle’ concept. To interrogate the morality of big data use along the various stages of a data life cycle we adopt a ‘lawyerly’ mode of ethical reasoning that is ethically pluralistic and pragmatic in the sense of arriving at a convincing ethical argument for or against a given practice. The contribution of the article is thus twofold: First, it summarises five big data uses cases from the legal domain in a structured way, pointing to details that might not be obvious otherwise. Secondly, it proposes an approach of morally interrogating big data use cases that combines the logic of following the data’s life cycle with a ‘lawyerly’ perspective, making it potentially valuable to those aiming to interrogate (and change) big data systems in practice. This article is structured as follows. In Section 1, we articulate a framework for examining big data ethics as applied to the legal domain. We do this by first defining ‘big data’ (Section 1.1) and specifying the big data life cycle model on which we rely to articulate a systematic view of big data ethics (Section 1.2). Also, the article advances a working conception of the type of considerations deemed ‘ethical’ in the context of big data ethics (Section 1.3). Section 2, which makes up the bulk of the article, first introduces the five illustrative cases and then proceeds to briefly describe each case and illustrate its ethical significance for the stages of the big data life cycle. In Section 3 we bring together the insights gained through the different cases to offer a systematic overview of some of the key ethical concerns that might arise along the big data life cycle. Section 4 notes some limitations and concludes the discussion.