CUSP-GX 1007 Data Governance, Ethics and Privacy (0 Credit Lab)

0 Credits

This class will teach you to recognize where and understand why ethical issues can arise when applying analytics to urban problems. You will consider issues across the lifecycle of projects that aim to improve city life through data-driven decision-making, starting with collection and moving through the management, sharing, and analysis of data. You will learn how to parse the unique privacy implications of persistent monitoring of activities in putatively public space, the introduction of sensors and other forms of instrumented measurement into the built environment, the repurposing of government data for uses not anticipated at the time of collection, and the kind of analytic techniques that turn these data into actionable insights. The class will also teach you how to assess whether these result in fairly rendered decisions and how to evaluate the desirability of their consequences (from the perspective of various stakeholders). Finally, the class will force you to consider what ethical obligations you may have to those who figure in your research, as well as those to whom the lessons are later applied. You will learn to think critically about how to plan, execute, and evaluate a project with these concerns in mind, and how to cope with novel challenges for which there are often no easy answers or established solutions. To do so, you will develop fluency in the key technical, ethical, policy, and legal terms and concepts that are relevant to a normative assessment of these novel analytic techniques. You will learn about some of the common approaches and tools for mitigating or managing the ethical concerns that these tend to provoke. And by exposing you to a variety of policy documents, the class will help you understand the current regulatory environment and anticipate future developments.