From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

Power imbalances

From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

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Power imbalances

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- If you look at the way the word democracy is constructed, it comes from two Greek words. One being people, demos, and the other being power, kratos. So in a democracy, theoretically, the common people are the ones with the ultimate power. In business corporations, our legal, creations. That is, they came into existence only because a government decided to allow them to exist. So in the abstract, people have power over government and government has power over business. Now I think most of us know that's an ideal. Even in a fairly healthy democracy, it's not going to be difficult to find examples when the government has an unhealthy amount of power over a particular individual or group. It will be equally easy to find examples where the government is unable to control a particular business, even when the business is doing something unethical, even though the government might be generally a well-functioning one. Part of the reason is because when I refer to power, I don't mean complete control. Rather, I mean something like final authority. The people have the right to change their government if they don't like it, and the government has the right to regulate business activity and tax it in the interest of the people. So we need to fine tune our understanding of power in this sense. It means final authority, not complete control. And I believe that the record of history shows that the healthiest societies are the ones where the common people have final authority over the government and the law gives government final authority over business organizations. But something is happening in only the last few years that has totally changed this balance. There is a saying that knowledge is power. It seems that this saying rings true on many levels. But perhaps it's time to revise this generally true saying by making it more specific. Yes, knowledge is power, but these days you get knowledge from data. And so maybe a more to the point saying is data is power. Now that should make us think, because the time-tested formula people have authority over government, government via law, has authority over businesses, that doesn't seem to fit, because currently businesses are the ones with the data, and government can pretty easily get data on its citizens, but it usually has to ask the businesses to cooperate by giving away their data. So it seems that the government has a level of power over its citizens that it never had before, because it suddenly has a ton of our data, but we have very little data on the government. There are small examples of citizens getting government data such as the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, where citizens can request certain data from government and the government is legally obligated to give it over. In fact, this is how the recidivism data set that we are using in our labs was obtained. But these examples are few and far between. It's mostly the case that government has our data and we don't have the government data. And businesses have a lot of data that the government would like to have. It sometimes tries to force business to hand over that data, but business does not always comply. So if you think about it, we are now entering a new era of history where business has a kind of power over the government that it never had, and government has a kind of power over its citizens, at least to a degree, that it never had before. It would be one thing if this were a slow evolution that we all had time to adjust to. But this is all happening at a speed that we can't really even conceptualize. It is a revolution in knowledge distribution, and it's important that we understand and talk about this power shift.

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