Data Ethics Club: Data Ethics New Year’s Resolutions Special#
What’s this?
This is summary of Wednesday 22nd January’s Data Ethics Club discussion, where we spoke and wrote about our resolutions for 2025. The summary was written by Jessica Woodgate, who tried to synthesise everyone’s contributions to this document and the discussion. “We” = “someone at Data Ethics Club”. Huw Day helped with the final edit.
Our first meeting for 2025 was our annual DEC new year’s resolution session, celebrating our fourth year as a club. Rather than set specific reading, we take the opportunity to set data ethics related resolutions for the year ahead and reflect on any previous resolutions. Optional reading material included our previous new year’s resolutions from 2024, 2023, and 2022.
Discussion#
Did you make any resolutions last year? How’d it go?#
Last year, we were keen to upgrade our technical skillsets. We pursued this by improving our coding abilities. Some of us are also spending time doing quantitative data analysis with R, even though we work in a mostly qualitative area. Building on our level of participation, this year we read more of the articles in advance and have started showing up to more meetings. Outside of DEC, some of us our happy to say we’ve graduated from our PhDs!
What resolutions do you want to make this year?#
The topics we discuss at DEC are not isolated from our own lives; this year we’d like to take more of that knowledge and apply it to our work. One way we could do this is by holding research projects and trials we are involved in to closer ethical scrutiny. Another direction is to apply knowledge garnered from DEC discussions to key decisions regarding data usage. For example, DEC helps inform how we think through the ethical implications of cleaning data. Implications encompass not just immediate considerations but also future uses and risks; it’s important to balance using a data item for what it was intended for at the time of capture, and ensuring that it remains ethically sound later down the line. Whilst there’s often a need to squeeze every ounce of utility from a datapoint, we must also ensure we are sincerely representing how much we can get out of it.
Examining our approach to data handling is a good place to start but should be accompanied by a broader view that takes overarching ethical considerations into account. Many people have an underlying assumption that technology is intrinsically good or neutral and the ethics behind it is a separate issue that needs to be fixed. We need to challenge this viewpoint; looking at the data alone does not get to the root of the problem. To make real progress with ethics in our work, we must address things that get in the way, such as thinking of worst case scenarios that are so far out of reach it’s not sensible to consider them.
Whilst we feel it’s important to encourage ethical thinking in our workplaces, we don’t want to be pigeonholed into being the “data ethics person”. It’s important to us to find a middle ground between not doing anything and doing only ethics. To cultivate this balance, we’re looking into various tools that might be useful in solidifying ethical practices in the workplace.
Using what we learn at DEC to make real change involves a move from data ethics into data justice, which actively works to dismantle unfair structural power differentials. Where data ethics mainly involves discussions and conversations with friends and colleagues, data justice consists of active participation in things like protests or voting. Social justice can be applied to the uses of data, such as addressing the legal elements of consent and additional uses of content beyond its original intent (e.g. deceased celebrities being recreated by generative AI without their consent). We can integrate ethical critical thinking into different application areas by supporting similar initiatives to DEC such as Social Work Ethics Club. Initiating ethics clubs in applied areas is a good way to explore how data is used in particular applications and how to use data in ways that do not cause harm to others. We can also implement knowledge gained from Data Feminism into our everyday lives.
As well as widening involvement in groups outside of DEC, there are various ways we can increase our participation in DEC itself. We’d like to try another “getting to know you” session, and take part in this year’s Summer Book Club in which we’ll be reading AI Snake Oil. We can contribute to the Slack thread, which we use to stay in touch about events or interesting ethics topics we come across. We can also do more writing, such as contributing blogs to the website. More of us will try and submit to the reading list; we’d like to read about other areas we wouldn’t have otherwise been interested in, rather than picking things about topics that we already know about.
Listening to varied perspectives is crucial to build informed viewpoints. We like that in DEC there is usually someone in a group with particular expertise or practical knowledge of the field we’re looking at. It’s really helpful to listen to the perspectives of people outside of academia and with more applied backgrounds, to get a broader range of takeaways from the reading than what we would infer on our own. Widening the scope of perspectives helps us to get out of echo chambers and identify when topics are being hyped. It’s important to challenge arguments and break cycles of groupthink mindsets.
Attendees#
Huw Day, Data Scientist, University of Bristol, LinkedIn BlueSky
Amy Joint, Programme Manager, ISRCTN (UK’s Clinical Study Registry) LinkedIn
Noshing Mohamed, Principal Social Worker and QA lead for children’s services in Newham
Matimba Swana, PhD student, Univeristy of Bristol, Linkedin
Kamilla Wells, Citizen Developer, Australian Public Service, Brisbane
Paul Matthews, Senior Lecturer, Computing and Creative Tech, UWE Bristol
Adrianna Jezierska, PhD Student University of Bristol LinkedIn