Die ethischen Abgründe der Big-Data-Forschung

Even research which is conducted within the university setting is increasingly pushing up against new ethical frontiers in the creation of machine learning algorithms based on vast pools of human-created training data. For example, several researchers I spoke with mentioned situations where colleagues had taken large datasets licensed to the university for strictly non-commercial use or collected from human subjects for strictly academic research and used them to construct large machine learning computer models. These models were then licensed from the university to the faculty member's private startup, where they were then used for commercial gain. In at least some cases, protected human subjects data was used to create a computer model for academic research, which was approved by IRB, but that model was then allegedly subsequently licensed by the university for commercial use to the faculty member's startup. None of the researchers were privy to whether IRB had approved the commercial licensing or if that occurred without IRB knowledge and they argued that the very nature of a machine learning model deidentifies such data to the point that it should no longer be considered human subjects data.