Answer all the questions. None of these questions will be graded.
Read the Harvard Business Review article, Hiring Algorithms are Not Neutral, by Gideon Mann and Cathy O’Neil.
What is the primary ethical issue discussed in the article?
What does the article suggest that HR departments should do to avoid algorithmic bias?
What type of review would a university ethics board apply to a study of publicly available social media posts of university students’ political beliefs? Discuss any ethical considerations.
(modified from Exercise 6.2 in Modern Data Science with R) Kathy, a data science student, found two publicly available data sets posted on a website. Both data sets were obtained by scraping two social media sites. Kathy joined the datasets by screen name and was able to create a new data set that included: screen name; email address; geographic location; IP (Internet protocol) address, demographic profiles, and preferences for relationships. If email address were removed then is it problematic to post this data set on a social media site?
Read the section on Responsibilities to Research Subjects in the American Statistical Association’s Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice. Do these guidelines suggest that the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica were unethical when they linked the Facebook profiles to other databases to target Facebook users (see NYT story or search for other recent articles)? Explain.