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| Figure 1. Human-Data Interaction. Our personal data feeds black-box analytics algorithms. These output inferences driving actions whose effects may or may not be visible to us, and which may include changes in our behaviour and the data generated about and by us subsequently. |
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The rapidly evolving ecosystems associated with personal data is creating an entirely new field of scientific study, say computer scientists. And this requires a much more powerful ethics-based infrastructure.
Back in 2013, the UK supermarket giant, Tesco, announced that it was installing face recognition software in 450 of its stores that would identify customers as male or female, guess their age and measure how long they looked at an ad displayed on a screen below the camera. Tesco would then give the data to advertisers to show them how well their advertising worked and allow them to target their ads more carefully.
Many commentators pointed out the similarity between this system and the sci-fi film Minority Report in which people are bombarded by personalised ads which detect who they are and where they are looking.
It also raised important questions about data collection and privacy. How would customers understand the potential uses of this kind of data, how would they agree to these uses and how could they control the data after it was collected?
Abstract
The increasing generation and collection of personal data has created a complex ecosystem, often collaborative but sometimes combative, around companies and individuals engaging in the use of these data. We propose that the interactions between these agents warrants a new topic of study: Human-Data Interaction (HDI). In this paper we discuss how HDI sits at the intersection of various disciplines, including computer science, statistics, sociology, psychology and behavioural economics. We expose the challenges that HDI raises, organised into three core themes of legibility, agency and negotiability, and we present the HDI agenda to open up a dialogue amongst interested parties in the personal and big data ecosystems.
Physics arXiv: Human-Data Interaction: The Human Face of the Data-Driven Society
Richard Mortier, Hamed Haddadi, Tristan Henderson, Derek McAuley, Jon Crowcroft
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