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Profile: Ramón Alvarado, Data Ethics
Ramón Alvarado
BY JASON STONE, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS PHOTO BY DUSTIN WHITAKER, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
“There’s something very peculiar about computers and the way that computers understand our world,” says Ramón Alvarado. “I see two immediate avenues for the humanist scholar to engage with information technology: questions about epistemology—the nature of knowledge—and questions about ethics.”
A member of the University of Oregon Presidential Initiative in Data Science, Alvarado studies computers and how people use them.
He recalls, in graduate school, how the emerging field of complexity science led him to observe that breakthroughs in various areas were made possible only through computer programming. He’s been grappling with technology’s role in knowledge creation ever since.
Says Alvarado: “I began to recognize how technological mediation—the ways technology, like language, is used to navigate the world—has many consequences for public policy, business practices, and even how we all relate to one another.”
DATA ETHICS
Alvarado notes that mobile phones transmit data about users to corporate servers every few seconds. Your phone also likely contains a gyroscope, a thermometer, and other utilities that are constantly in contact with your internet service provider and other entities.
“Without even thinking about it,” he says, “we’re creating data about ourselves all the time.”
Nor do we spend much time considering the “rights and wrongs” of how our data is captured and manipulated, Alvarado says. Even among scholars, the field of data ethics—and how to define it—is open to debate.
“In my view as a philosopher,” Alvarado says, “data ethics is in large part about how we gather data about human subjects and what we do to one another with that data once we have gained access to it.”
For Alvarado, particularly worrisome is aggregated metadata—data sets that summarize information about other data files. Metadata commonly includes details such as authorship and location. When entities with financial or political interests gather metadata, ethical questions arise.
