Next month Compliance Week will be hosting a virtual conference on Big Data. Part of my job here is to recruit high-caliber speakers to talk about various slices of that admittedly broad subject, and hence I ended up on the phone last week with Kord Davis.
Davis is author of the book Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation (O’Reilly Media, 2012), and yes, he’ll be exploring some of those ethical challenges during our virtual event. Other speakers will tackle more practical matters, like how you can use Big Data to improve auditing or root out fraud. I told Davis, however—a philosophy major at Reed College turned tech consultant for the last 20 years—that I wanted him to focus on the grey areas created by Big Data, where companies have the ability to do all sort of morally questionable things, yet the law is nowhere near sufficient to address whether they should do those things.
