Abstract
Mature information societies are characterised by mass production of data that provide insight into human behaviour. Analytics (as in big data analytics) has arisen as a practice to make sense of the data trails generated through interactions with networked devices, platforms and organisations. Persistent knowledge describing the behaviours and characteristics of people can be constructed over time, linking individuals into groups or classes of interest to the platform. Analytics allows for a new type of algorithmically assembled group to be formed that does not necessarily align with classes or attributes already protected by privacy and anti-discrimination law or addressed in fairness- and discrimination-aware analytics. Individuals are linked according to offline identifiers (e.g. age, ethnicity, geographical location) and shared behavioural identity tokens, allowing for predictions and decisions to be taken at a group rather than individual level. This article examines the ethical significance of such ad hoc groups in analytics and argues that the privacy interests of algorithmically assembled groups in inviolate personality must be recognised alongside individual privacy rights. Algorithmically grouped individuals have a collective interest in the creation of information about the group, and actions taken on its behalf. Group privacy is proposed as a third interest to balance alongside individual privacy and social, commercial and epistemic benefits when assessing the ethical acceptability of analytics platforms.
Highlights
Mature information societies are characterised by mass production of data that provide insight into human behaviour
Individuals are linked according to offline identifiers and new behavioural identity tokens, allowing for predictions and decisions to be taken at a group rather than individual level (Grindrod 2014)
This right would stand in contrast to protections afforded to identifiable individuals in privacy and data protection law
Summary
Mature information societies are characterised by mass production of data that provide insight into human behaviour (Floridi 2016b). The article does not define a general theory of group privacy but instead examines the case for granting a specific informational privacy right—the right to inviolate personality—to ad hoc groups. This right would stand in contrast (but not opposition) to protections afforded to identifiable individuals in privacy and data protection law. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the need for group privacy rights in analytics, including how a group identity is formed that attributes but is not reducible to the individual identities of members.
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