6 PRIVACY AND ETHICS

The biggest unknown facing data science today is how societies will choose to answer a new version of the old question regarding how best to balance the freedoms and privacy of individuals and minorities against the security and interests of society. In the context of data science, this old question is framed as follows: What do we as a society view are reasonable ways to gather and use the data relating to individuals in contexts as diverse as fighting terrorism, improving medicine, supporting public-policy research, fighting crime, detecting fraud, assessing credit risk, providing insurance underwriting, and advertising to targeted groups?