Panel 3: Ethical and privacy issues around creative uses of Big Data

Participants in Panel 3 included Duncan Ross (Teradata), Anthony Rimmer (Agile Customer Insights), Tom Van Laer (ESCP Europe) and Peter Stephenson-Wright (ESCP Europe). The discussion revolved around the value that Big Data can bring to consumers and more generally to society. This question puts the onus on analysts and marketers to think creatively about how they can improve lives in a way that is ethical, relevant to individuals and society at large, and does not violate consumers' privacy. Relevance here can be in terms of lifestyle, convenience and other benefits but also in terms of access to sensitive information. Much of this relevance also comes from a trade-off between on the one hand, how much information is captured and the associate privacy and ethical issues and on the other hand, what the information is used for. Trust can only be built between consumers and analysts (and the marketers using the data), if there is transparency between what is captured, why it is captured and how it will be used.

Some interesting points were raised:
(1) The government captures much more data than it is able to process and could make great strides towards solving economic challenges if it were to better use captured data
(2) Giving greater access to data to a wider range of people who can analyze it productively can potentially increase the value of the data at the same time as promoting greater transparency.
(3) The crowdsourcing and philanthropic efforts discussed earlier in the day in the presentations by Nicolas de Cordes, Orange France Telecom and Duncan Ross, Teradata, were excellent examples of the potential societal value that can be extracted from data if the right framework is put into place, e.g., clear value objectives, broad access, purging data of any sensitive and irrelevant information and strong privacy parameters.
(4) These "out of the box" uses of Big Data can also lead to the development of innovative, valuable and ethical analytical practices to be used in both the private and public sectors