of those actions. In his call for serious
ethical inquiry, Davis asserts that “Organizations realize that information has
value that can be extracted and turned
into new products…the ethical impact is
highly context-dependent. But to ignore
that there is an ethical impact is to court
an imbalance between the benefits of innovation and the detriment of risk.”
Especially, as Lanier would be quick
to add, “with technology itself enabling
the risk to be pushed off onto many, while
the benefits are captured by an ever
smaller few.”
As Packer reports, Amazon has given very little thought to the near-term
ethics or the long-term implications of
the way in which it has used its customers’ data to obtain its current level of
market power. But as Amazon’s current
battle [1] with publisher Hachette rages
on, with publishers, governments and
erstwhile business partners sure to follow, it is clear that this particular story is
far from over.
As analytics professionals, neither is
ours. We have a significant stake in the
outcomes of these conversations about
ethics and the future. As such, we would
be wise to actively participate in those
conversations. At this particular moment,
we have considerable leverage to advocate for a digital future that reflects our
own values.
A NA L Y T I C S
The world of digital business – our
own personalized Siren Server – has
provided us with a massive, lucrative,
and free channel for our products and
services. Today’s digital enterprise depends so much on our ever-expanding
ability to capture, transmit, store, integrate and organize data, and our deep
capacity to use this data to summarize,
analyze, correlate, predict and optimize.
Through no fault of our own, we have
been bestowed with The Sexiest Job
of the 21st Century [2], and it is indeed
tempting to believe that we are an integral and indispensable part of the world
in which we live and work, and that we
always will be.
Turns out this is exactly what the publishers thought when Amazon first appeared on the scene too. Beware: There
is no free lunch.
Vijay Mehrotra ([email protected]) is a
professor in the Department of Business Analytics
and