Linnet Taylor: What’s ethical about data ethics?

‘Data ethics can be defined as the branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data, algorithms and corresponding practices, in order to formulate and support morally good solutions’ (Floridi and Taddeo, 2016). Despite the growing calls for ethical behaviour on the part of those gathering, handling and trading digital data, many of the issues that we see emerging are actually problems of power and politics. These have a clear ethical dimension, but asking ethics (or ethicists) to solve them does not provide the kind of leverage necessary. This presentation will ask when and how we should separate out problems of ethics from problems of power, politics and governance, how we might think about the relationships between these perspectives, and how the technical field is currently addressing them.