Data Ethics

Song of the Day

• End Credits -Laptop

Main ideas

• Examine a few data science case studies that illustrate ethical issues
• Discuss ethics in a data science context
• Illustrate importance of considering ethical issues when working with data

Coming up

• Resolve issues on GitHub
• Complete course evaluation in DukeHub
  • 39/85
• Project work
  • Submit final project and repo by Tue, Apr 27 11:59 PM
  • No late work will be accepted
  • Thursday class devoted to project work

Student Recommendations

• Dark (2)
• The Crown
• Elite
• Black Mirror (2)
• Peaky Blinders
• Game of Thrones
• Designated Survivor
• Schitt’s Creek (2)
• Social Dilemma
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• How I Met Your Mother
• Solar Opposites
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Money Heist (2)
• Criminal Minds (2)
• Last Chance U
• The Queen’s Gambit

Discussion guidelines

• Listen respectfully. Listen actively and with an ear to understanding others’ views.
• Criticize ideas, not individuals.
• Commit to learning, not debating. Comment in order to share information, not to persuade.
• Avoid blame, speculation, and inflammatory language.
• Avoid assumptions about any member of the class or generalizations about social groups.

Privacy: Target(ed) Advertising

Data science teams at retailers like Target study consumer purchase history and demographics to increase sales. Strategies like appropriately pricing items and sending targeting coupons are employed.

A data scientist at Target used buying data for individuals who later signed up for a Target baby registry.

“…buying … unscented lotion … supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. … scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls [and] hand sanitizers and washcloths…”

“…each shopper [received] a pregnancy prediction score … estimate her due date to within a small window [and] send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.”

Later…

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. ‘She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?’

Even later…

“‘I had a talk with my daughter,’ he said. ’It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

• How do you feel about this?
• What ethical issues arise when using data for targeted advertising?
• Is it possible Target’s pregnancy model isn’t very good?

The Hathaway Effect

Does Anne Hathaway News Drive Berkshire Hathaway’s Stock?

• Oct. 3, 2008 - Rachel Getting Married opens: BRK.A up .44%

• Jan. 5, 2009 - Bride Wars opens: BRK.A up 2.61%

• Feb. 8, 2010 - Valentine’s Day opens: BRK.A up 1.01%

• March 5, 2010 - Alice in Wonderland opens: BRK.A up .74%

• Nov. 24, 2010 - Love and Other Drugs opens: BRK.A up 1.62%

• Nov. 29, 2010 - Anne announced as co-host of the Oscars: BRK.A up .25%

• What is going on here?

Misrepresenting Data

Carefully examine the visualizations below. Then, discuss the questions below with your group.

• What is the graph trying to show?
• Why is this graph misleading?
• How can you improve this graph?

What baby boomers think

Brexit poll results

Engineering & Cheese

Google Ad Personalization

The tasks pane for today outlines steps to view your Google ad personalization keywords.

• How accurate are the keywords? Anything surprising?
• Were you aware this information was being collected?
• What are your thoughts about this? Privacy violation? Just part of using the service?

Web scraping

A researcher is interested in the relationship of weather to sentiment (positivity or negativity of posts) on Twitter. They want to scrape data from https://www.wunderground.com and join that to Tweets in that geographic area at a particular time. One complication is that Weather Underground limits the number of data points that can be downloaded for free using their API (application program interface). The researcher sets up six free accounts to allow them to collect the data they want in a shorter time-frame.

• What ethical considerations might be violated by this approach to data scraping?
• What can the researcher do to collect the data in an ethical way?

Posting data from social media

A data analyst received permission to post a data set that was scraped from a social media site. The full data set included name, screen name, email address, geographic location, IP (Internet protocol) address, demographic profiles, and preferences for relationships. The analyst removes name and email address from the data set in effort to deidentify it.

• Why might it be problematic to post this data set publicly?
• How can you store the full dataset in a safe and ethical way?
• You want to make the data available so your analysis is transparent and reproducible. How can you modify the full data set to make the data available in an ethical way?

Submission

To complete the lecture notes for today, push your annotated R Markdown file to GitHub.

Sources

• Data Science in a Box
• How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did
• How companies learn your secrets
• Does Anne Hathaway news drive Berkshire Hathaway stock?

Additional Information

• From data to viz
  • Choosing appropriate graphics
• How charts lie: getting smarter about data visualization
• Ethics and data science
  • free
• A reader on data visualization: ethics
• Collecting and handling data
  • Modified from Modern Data Science with R, 2nd Edition
• Data science at the University of Chicago
• Data science ethics at the Turing Institute
• DataKind
• New Yorker on the dangers of big data