by Angela Guess
Matt Kelly of Compliance Week has written an article discussing the possible ethical concerns surrounding Big Data. He writes, “Food businesses do indeed use purchase data to help them determine inventory needs and to test pricing levels. That unto itself isn’t unethical, and I buy pretty much the same items every week anyway, so my righteous indignation about consumer choice is more hot air than anything else. But consider the more famous case from Target last year, where the company deduced that one of its teen-aged customers was pregnant and broke this news to her father (via coupon offers for maternity items he intercepted in the mail) before she did.”
Kelly goes on, “That sort of story is enough to make any reasonable adult feel a bit uneasy. The opening line of that news article about Target, however, is even more disturbing. Two marketing executives from Target visited one of the company’s data analysts and asked him: ‘If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that’?”
He continues, “Even if she didn’t want us to know—that’s the part that should have compliance officers falling out of their chairs in fear. It speaks to a whole new level of privacy concerns that, right now, our legal system and our society haven’t answered. So various people at various companies will test the bounds of what’s acceptable, and at least some of them are bound to end up in the headlines as Target did last year. Expect awkward conversations to follow after that, and expect the ethics and compliance officer (read: you) to be a part of them.”
