Ethics of Big Data: Who Makes Data Big?

Paolo Gerbaudo (Digital Society Lab, KCL)
Anne Alexander (Digital Humanities Network, Cambridge)

This workshop will analyse the contemporary political economy of big data production and analysis through a series of provocation papers examining the implications of existence of data monopolies for ethical agency. It will ask where does a ‘monopoly’ lie in data? Is it in the aggregation of data, or in the processing, or in the analysis? Does it matter that a handful of giant corporations dominate markets in social media, search, online mapping and a wide range of the digital services which play a central role in the production of big data? What is the relationship between states and corporations in the production and analysis of big data? Whose ethical decision-making matters the most in this complex landscape: consumers, elected and non-elected government officials, judges, corporate executives or software developers?