Applied Ethics to (Big) data

Abstract

It should be considered Big Data (BD) as a socio-technological phenomenon because it is transforming the culture of communication. Storing, managing and using data, in many cases for profit, poses problems related to privacy, property, identity, privacy, trust or reputation. Although they are not new problems, it is true that are now being overwhelmed these issues because the main characteristics of BD: volume, variety, veracity, value and, specially, velocity. The specific thesis of this work poses that it is no possible to elude for longer the ethical components of these actions related to BD. We are facing a new scenario where the most evident vanishes, and allows pointing the most obvious: think ethics in a necessarily revolutionary way, since a new moral subject has already supplanted the subject —human— responsible in decision-making processes. Firstly, we will focus on the areas in which we can establish that this applied ethics operates. Immediately after, we will address what we have called the problem of identification of the moral subject, and then we will argue the possible adoption of a new Copernican turn that allows us to establish the (possible) attributions of rationality that could unfold this unprecedented moral subject represented by machines.