BPMN 3123 Ethic Management

School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

BPMN 3123 MANAGEMENT ETHICS

FIRST SEMESTER SESSION 2018/19

GROUP ASSIGNMENT
BIG DATA AND ETHICAL ISSUES

GROUP C

Submitted to:
DR. ABDUL MANAF BIN BOHARI

Prepared by:
DREAM TEAM
MATRIC. NO. NAME
1 246077 LEE SHUQI
2 246155 IRENE NGAU MEI KIN
3 246373 YAW HUI YUAN

Submitted date:
11ST OCTOBER 2018
 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page Number

Abstract 1

Introduction 1–2

Definition and Concepts 2–3

Literature Review of Ethical Issues

Issue of Privacy 3–4
Issue in Healthcare 4–5
Issue of Digital Divide 6–7

Model and Approaches 7

A Scenario in Malaysia 7–8

Suggestions and Recommendation

Data Anonymization 8
Access Control Policy 8–9
Profiling and Knowledge Sharing 9 – 10

Conclusion and Discussion 10

References 11 – 12
 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

BIG DATA AND ETHICAL ISSUES

Lee Shuqia, Yaw Hui Yuanb, Irene Ngau Mei Kinc

a
School of Economics, Finance and Banking, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia
Email: [email protected]
b
School of Economics, Finance and Banking, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia
Email: [email protected]
cSchool of Economics, Finance and Banking, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Today, big data is captured and pervaded through a variety of fields. This study aims to identify,
define and prioritize ethical issues and concerns related to big data as they pertain to individuals,
organizations and society. Big data is evolving very fast nowadays due to its great usage.
However, its consequences cannot be ignored. Identifying and exploring its ethical implication is
therefore important for both users of big data and for those who are the target of its use. Besides,
we also shed light on the suggestions or recommendation to overcome these ethical issues.

Keywords: Big data, Ethical Issues, Suggestions, Recommendations

INTRODUCTION

Over the last few years, there was a clear remarkable increase in the amount of data
across various academic disciplines including management, business, academy,
information systems and so on. The amount of data is growing exponentially, being
compounded by the Internet, social media, cloud computing, mobile devices,
governmental data and so on. As big data technologies emerge in our networked society,
a new synthesis of real-time, user-generated information and communication creates a
constant flow of potential new insights for business, government, education and social
initiatives (Julie, Peter, Chow-White, Maryam & Dung Ha, 2016).

For the past several years, we have seen the popular applications of big data, such
as inferring people’s daily travel behavior and interaction using mobile phone data
(Jianzheng, Jie Li, Weifeng & Jiansheng, 2016). Nowadays, digitally-savvy organizations
are also using big data in many strategic ways to do what they have always done but
better; to do something differently or something completely new, to co-create value with
the potential customers or to monetize data. Also, data is used in real-time fraud
detection, web display advertising and competitive analysis, social media and sentiment
analysis, intelligent traffic management and so on. We can foresee that the big wave of
big data will be extended to be used in other applications such as real-time population
census and energy use at home or in vehicles. From here, we can clearly see that big
data is helping to develop each aspect of human’s life and business.

Although big data has now become a ubiquitous term in many industries and
academia, there are several ethical issues regarding big data raised because the
practice of collecting public data may involve the absence of seeking appropriate ethical
approval. It is making the world in an anxious mode. The bigness of big data may not
only refer to its large data volume, complex data structure and fine granularity but also to
the significance of data quality and usage problems in big data (Jianzheng, Jie Li,
Weifeng & JianSheng, 2016). For this reason, it is necessary for us to invest the time
and effort to identify the ethical issues to suggest some effective ways to overcome

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 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

these ethical issues. Given its obvious success and its hectic evolution, big data ethics
should be addressed to make sure that the usages, methods and impacts of the big data
are based on the ethics, not causing the harms and disadvantages to the society. It
should be the concern because the side effects of new big data techniques have
revealed both consumer protection and discrimination issues, leading us to an ever more
unequal society.

DEFINITION AND CONCEPTS

Big data has a lot number of meanings. Some define big data as very large sets of
data that are impossible to analyze manually by hand or through traditional methods
such as a spreadsheet (Julie, Peter A., Chow-White, Maryam & Dung Ha, 2016). Then,
the massive data generated is moving, analyzed, and utilized at a faster and faster pace.
This popular definition is called the 3 Vs: volume, variety, and velocity. In this “3V” model,
volume means that the usual big data have a large data volume whereas variety refers to
the big data that are obtained from a variety of sources besides having verified data
structures and potential applications. Velocity means the real time or quasi-real-time data
updating. According to IBM 2013, ‘‘4V” and ‘‘5V” models are emerging to describe big
data as researchers attempt to redefine big data. IBM promotes the conformance to
veracity to explain the bias problems brought by big data and believes that the ‘‘4V”
model can describe big data more accurately. Nonetheless, others point out that big data
is more than the sum of its technical parts. In other way, big data is the result of
collecting, storing and processing increasingly large and complex data sets from a
variety of sources to produce information through the analysis. It represents a social
movement or cultural shift in organizations to data driven decision making.

According to the Gartner (2015) Hype Cycle methodology, once an important new
technology is introduced, it progresses through a sharp peak in visibility and inflated
expectations and followed by a downward slope into disillusionment, and eventually
stabilizes back upwards through enlightenment and ultimately widespread productivity.
According to this, the concept of big data has moved through the initial hype and
disillusionment phases in public discourse. It is still in the preliminary stages of the
disillusionment stage in academic research across a wide range of disciplines.

Furthermore, big data is generally considered linkable and connected information

that have large data volumes and complex data structures such as social media data,
mobile phone call records, commercial website data (e.g., eBay, Taobao), volunteering
geographical information, search engine data, smart card data, and taxi trajectory data
(Jianzheng, Jie Li, Weifeng & Jiansheng 2016). Generally, we can say that big data is
evolving too quickly that a universally accepted formal statement defining its meaning
does not exist. Besides, this does not prevent the authors of big data-related workers to
stop extending and renovating its previous definitions and propose new ones.

As in the case of other IT-related initiatives, big data also has its own set of problems
and challenges. They include difficulties of a technical, organizational and legal nature.
Those in the first category are connected with such issues as the selection of the most
useful techniques, technologies and tools or the creation of an efficiently functioning
system for feeding the most relevant data to support the organizational goals (Wielki J.
2015). A coin always has two sides. Hence, the capabilities of big data cause a large
array of ethical issues with potentially more wide-reaching implications for individuals,
organizations, industry and society.

Ethical issues or concepts, understood as areas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or the clash of
competing values or normative interests among stakeholders (Brent Daniel Mittelstadt &
Luciano Floridi 2015). On the other hand, ethics also refers to the moral guidance for

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School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

behaviour and principles of truth (Lewis 1985) reflects the Kantian and utilitarian
viewpoints as theoretically underpinning the ethical behaviour of human economic actors
(Newell & Marabelli 2015). Specifically, an action is considered ethical if it is intended to
maximize positive outcomes for the majority in the society (Newell & Marabelli 2015).
Basically, ethics is a kind of discipline examining the moral standard to evaluate its
reasonableness or unreasonableness and their implication to the individual and society.

LITERATURE REVIEW OF ETHICAL ISSUES

Issue of Privacy

Unsurprisingly, privacy features are frequently seen in the literature, social media
and applications. Privacy is a topic involving concepts of confidentiality, liberty, autonomy,
secrecy, and solitude. Researches, newspapers and journals often address the ethical issue
regarding the privacy issues of Big Data due to the prevalence of the concept in international
legislation and related discussions in applied ethics. Some applications or links are
frequently made with confidentiality, understood as ‘‘the duties that accompany the
disclosure of non-public information within a fiduciary, professional or contractual
relationship’’. However, nowadays, there is a clear emerging forms of participatory data
generation such as social media in which the data subjects may not be aware of the extent
to which data can be publicly “scraped” or “stolen” and analysed outside of the “highly
context-sensitive spaces” in which it is created because big data is about the power of
discovery, and its business model incentivizes collection of more data for longer time periods
to enable unanticipated secondary uses of data (Elizabeth Alexandra Gray & Jane Hyatt
Thorpe 2015). Nevertheless, from the ethical perspective, this could have violated the data
privacy and this privacy issue is often being ignored in Big Data.

Beegar, in 2013 had mentioned that the more our lives become mirrored in a cyber
reality and recorded, the more our present and past become almost completely transparent
for actors with the right skills and access. This is because when we download the
applications, we need to fill in our information such as name, age, phone number, birthday,
address and so on to proceed to using the application. Also, nowadays, with the trend,
young generation tend to upload their “daily life stories” in the social media, telling the world
that what they are doing. These have resulted in freely accessible data because the data are
associated with an IP address to profile one person and make their daily life completely
transparent in the system. If the activity pattern of an individual user is found during the data
mining process, it can infringe on the user’s privacy and exceed the ‘‘minimal risk” in
research ethics (Jianzheng, Jie Li, Weifeng & Jiansheng 2016). The so-called minimal risk
here refers to the pain or discomfort that people experience in studies and that is worse than
what a person experiences in his or her daily life.

In other words, we can say that the data in the public include where they go, who
they are communicating with, what they have read and written, what they buy, what they are
interested in, what they eat, what they watch and so on. With these data, the financial
institutions and marketers can start profiling of individuals. Profiling of individuals could result
in discrimination as a type of unethical social impact (Zuboff 2015). Profiling could occur by
classifying individuals into groups, intentionally or unintentionally based on race, ethnic
group, and gender, social and economic status, while offering or restricting special
treatments or services to individuals or groups (Martin 2014; Newell and Marabelli 2015).
Also, they may monitor and surveillance the behaviours of individuals to do marketing. This
will help them to offer personalized services and products, which also implies that these
individuals are no longer exposed to all options and choices available on a market place.
Ultimately, this implies individuals are no longer subject to their basic rights of free choice
and behaviour; rather they are under the control and surveillance of algorithms aiming to
influence their decisions (Zuboff 2015). However, some people feel that they are not safe

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School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

anymore because it is against their privacy right besides feeling that this is annoying for
them. In my opinion, I strongly think that it is against the moral right of the human beings
which are the rights that all human beings everywhere possess to an equal extent simply by
virtue of being human beings. Again, according to Kant’s Theory of Categorical Imperative,
individuals generally should be left equally free to pursue their interests as long as we would
not be willing to have everyone deprived of the freedom to pursue the interest. From here,
when the marketers get the information through the big data, they will start selling and
promoting their products by calling non-stop, sending mails non-stop and so on. However,
these are actually disturbing the human from being treated equally free to pursue what they
are really interested in. Furthermore, when they do segmentation according to the marketing
techniques, they tend to screen out those are not their potential customers. Is this the quality
of being just, righteousness, equitableness or moral rightness? According to the Rawls’s
principle of distributive justice, everyone in the society should have equal opportunity.
Applying to that issue, everyone should have the equal chance to get to know the product
and not being segmented according to certain characteristics. This will cause inequality.

Some users of the social media might argue that social media data in public is
completely different from the fact that the permission to obtain and utilize the data. However,
once it is in the public, it will be used by the people. For an instance, Facebook is blamed for
the data leak which is the personal information about millions of users wrongly ended up in
the hands of Cambridge Analytica and the public believed that it has angered the users,
advertisers and lawmakers in April, 2018. This has shown that people feel like they are
being attacked when their data is exposed to other people or organization although they are
not physically attacked. Consequently, they feel uncomfortable and scared as if they are
naked in the public. The hackers or the thieves that get the data of the users tend to do
unethical actions such as hacking into the banking system to steal the money, making
fraudulent transactions and so on.

The public’s privacy is violated when the data of a particular person are collected
from a variety of sources even from cloud-based storage. When the data are collated, the
result is more than the simple sum of the parts. The data of a career-related media, Linkein,
will give you a very controlled image of a person. However, when all the comments written
by that person are found on social networks, online newspapers, forums and so on, their
image will not be under their direct control anymore. For an instance, a potential employer
who care about political opinions, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and even health-
related information will affect their decision whether to hire that person based on the data
that are indeed sensible. This will create an unintentional discrimination which is not ethical.
Undeniably, there are several privacy issues regarding the big data.

Issue in Healthcare

Big data in healthcare can be defined as “encompassing high volume, high diversity
biological, clinical, environmental and lifestyle information collected from single individuals to
large cohorts, in relation to their health and wellness status at one or several time points
(Auffray C & Balling R, 2016). Within the multidisciplinary contexts of data sharing
reinforcing and enabling discovery and infrastructure science, the recent scale of data
collection and its future use in biomedical research and clinical care are seemingly limitless
in the quest for precision medicine via the use of next generation sequencing technologies.
Undoubtedly, big data in healthcare has becoming more important nowadays because it can
be used to predict the outcome of disease prevention of comorbidities, saving the cost of
medical treatment and preventing premature death. In Malaysia, there is a focus on big data
and some initiatives already put in the place to share the information of patient such as
medical record. In addition, big data is useful as it will provide information about disease
and the warning signs for treatment to be administered. (Alexander CA, Wang L 2017)

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School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

There was an increasing trend of more information is needed by patient for their
healthcare options. Big data will also update the information and provide to their patient
according to their needs so that it can help them to make the best decision for themselves
and to comply with the medical treatment (Fatt QK, Ramadas A 2018). Big data is also used
to do the analysis in healthcare to prevent the risk and control the problem before it turning
into the unmanageable problem. According to the Malaysia National Health and Morbidity
Survey in 2015, the number of obese people has risen to 17.7%. Due to this reason, the
Ministry of Health Malaysia (MoH) has launched the Malaysia Health Data Warehouse
(MyHDW) to provide the patient information.

However, there are some challenges in big data such as data protection, data
sharing, data collection and data usage in this industry. For an instance, besides the
convenience provided by the big data, some culprits misuse its function to hack and steal
the patient information through the database that contains the patient information and their
health history. The “thieves” steal the medical record because it has more lasting value. By
doing so, they are able to get every information regarding the patients such as their financial
information, medical record, personal information and so on. It is also difficult for the victims
to do anything to prevent such circumstances as it happens through the hospitals’ or clinics’
database. Then, the hackers that have the medical records will use the personal information
to make fraudulent transactions such as sharing of legacy data, applying for a loan, credit
card and so on.

The action of the hacker is unethical and illegal this is because it is against the
privacy protection of the patients which will then be followed by a lot of harms and
disturbances. In my opinion, I think that it goes against human right which is the right
inherent to all human beings regardless of their race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language,
religion or other status. Such human rights include negative rights, mentioning the duties
others to not interfere in certain activities of the person who hold the right. In this case, I
believe that patients go to hospitals are for the treatment. Then, the hospitals have the
responsibility to take care of the privacy of the patients and the security of the database
system to prevent it from hacked. Hence, the patients should not be interfered by these
unethical cases due to their right.

Besides, poor documentation in hospital’s electronic health records (EHR) system

will also invoke the medical identity thieves to take unethical and illegal action. EHR is a way
to enhance patient’s safety by reducing the errors of healthcare and improving health of the
public. (Clegg, A., Bates, C., Young, J., Ryan, R., Nichols, L., Ann Teale, E.& Marshall, T.
2016). Nonetheless, there is a loss or destruction of data when transferring the data and this
may raise another problem which is the accuracy of the data. The medical identity thieves
will hack in the system and alter the information of the patient in order to cheat the insurance
company. The medical identity theft will obtain all the personal information such as address,
identification number and social security number so that it can impersonate the patient. With
this information, the medical identify theft can open a credit card and use it to fraudulently
obtain prescription drugs. This is not aligned with the moral standards of the society as one
of the characteristics of the moral standards says that it involves significant injuries to the
patients no matter it is physically or mentally. This kind of action is morally wrong or bad as it
involves theft of the data of the patients. This systemic ethical issues which involves social
practices will become worse if it affects the legal, economic or social systems of a country.
Therefore, the implication of the big data should be well protected. When the data becomes
more global, it will become complicated as all the medical record and health history are been
public. The information of the patient will be unethical use by other people. Hence, the
healthcare data must be monitored consistently because this unethical issue is becoming
more and more serious.

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 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

Issue of Digital Divide

As with access to and usage of modern information and communication technology,

‘digital divide’ can exist within Big Data practices. A recent study stated that the term ‘Big
Data divide’ is used to describe related but qualitatively different phenomena. It is
understood as the inequalities between data subjects providing the material for Big Data
analytics and the organisations with the necessary information to analyse and understand
the data (Andrejevic 2014; B. D. Mittelstadt, L. Floridi2015). The issue of divide is related to
‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ of Big Data, where the ability and thus opportunities to assess and
utilise Big Data are located within the few organisations possessing the required access,
computational, knowledge, and organisational resources necessary to analyse and
understand Big Data practices (Puschmann and Burgess, 2014).

Digital divide also refers to the difficulty in accessing services delivered through the
use of modern technologies, for example Internet, and hard to in actually understanding how
these processes work due to not being familiar with them. For instance, referring to the job
searching, the digital divide may generate the issue of discrimination since some peoples
might not familiar in the use of the tools Internet provided or they might have a lacked
access to Internet due to the place they live in and so they might have a more difficult
experience in finding a job. This issue has the potential to affect large portions of a society,
especially considered the higher mobility that is a part of the job market. Frustration and
disappointment might arise from a new perspective on social interactions and
communications, which might eventually lead to giving up and cause social withdrawal.

Furthermore, since the growth of Internet, there has been a digital divide between
those who have access to Internet information and those who do not. The term “data literacy”
describe the person who has the ability to explore and better use of the data available to
them. Nowadays, Big data is not only used for companies, institutions and government but
also for all of us individually. We can now get a lot of benefits from the data generated from
wearable devices such as smart watches, smart phones or smart bracelets. However, in
some undeveloped places, it is a barrier as they do not even have such devices to access to
the big data. They cannot even access or engage with digital technologies.

The improvement has been taken to bridge this gap to provide access and usage of
internet technology and information even in the most rural areas. However, a new issue of
digital divide in information is being formed with the growth of big data due to social
networking, Internet tracking, search engines, and others. Big Data is gradually becoming
the sole domain of large organisations, despite calls to allow data subjects to benefit from
and manipulate their data (B. D. Mittelstadt, L. Floridi 2015). Nonetheless, small and medium
sized companies are facing extreme difficulty in collecting data from a large number of users
who are providing wide ranges of information on various topics. They also do not have the
funds needed to purchase this data to develop and expand their own business information.
Large companies are buying out the smaller ones, such as the Facebook buying WhatsApp,
and building industries that make it difficult for others to rival, which has developed a divide
between those who have access to big data and those who do not (J. P. Shim, Aaron M.
French, Chengqi Guo, Joey Jablonski 2015). As this trend continues, the market will be
dominated by large companies where smaller companies cannot hope to compete. This is
because only large companies have the ability to access to the big data to do the market
analysis and grab the efficient information in the market immediately.

Besides, the issue of divide to be considered is also related in terms of access to

modify the data, or whether data subjects are allowed to be notified when data about them
are created, analysed or modified, and given fair opportunities to access the data and
correct errors or misunderstanding in the data and knowledge and profiles built upon it (Coll

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 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

2014; B. D. Mittelstadt, L. Floridi2015). Apparently, this potential right can be associated to

the “right to be forgotten” (Higuchi 2013), insofar as similar rights to modify privately held
personal data could possibly be assumed as an oversight mechanism. Supposedly, a right
to freedom to choice (self-determination) can ground such connected data rights to combat
the “transparency asymmetry” that exists when consumers have lack information about how
data is ‘‘collected, analysed and used’’ (Coll 2014; B. D. Mittelstadt, L. Floridi2015).
Therefore, broader social biases and inequalities can have immoral influence over data
analysis where subjects lack oversight.

From here, we can clearly see that the development of the big data and the growth of
the technologies to use the data have created digital divide ethical issue. Because of the
different level of accessibility, there is an inequality in terms of economic and social. The
divide between different countries or regions is very obvious as we can see the technological
gap between developing and developed countries such as most of the western countries.
From the other aspect, this difference is related to the justice issue. According to distributive
justice, just and equal distribution of the benefits and burdens is required. However, this
ethical issue does not go align with justice.

MODEL & APPROACHES

Late-BindingTM architecture

There was an approach addressing the healthcare’s data which is Late-

BindingTM architecture. Late binding refers to delaying the application of business rules so
that it can provide the healthcare systems with time to revise those data. (WAREHOUSE, E.
D. 2017) First, data that is in atomic form is brought from the source system and transferred
into the source marts of the data warehouse. At this stage, there is little data information
occuring. Second, determine the ideal binding points by using an incremental approach to
the binding data. Lastly, the data from the source mart is extracted so that it can create a
subject area of data mart. The subject area of data mart contains of patient populations such
as operating room workflows, admission workflows, or discharge workflows. Late-
BindingTM architecture has a lot of advantages such as data flexibility, changes saving and
granular security. We can store and mine our data with this model.

A SCENARIO IN MALAYSIA

In Malaysia, big data is driving the marketing today. Everyone is realizing the benefits
from big data by influencing consumer behavior. However, since big data trend has arrived
in Malaysia, there are some serious Malaysia social problems such as drug-related
problems, physical and sexual abuse and teen crimes. Unfortunately, the complexity and
seriousness of the social problems have diverted people’s focus away from the root causes
of the problems. Here, in Malaysia, they strongly believe that big data could have played a
big role by having pattern-matching algorithms, giving valuable insights into the origin of the
social problems besides providing focus on finding effective solutions.

There are some challenges faced by the big data industry in Malaysia. For examples,
lack of structured big data, shortages of skilled workforce, threats imposing ethical issues in
relation to data privacy, confidentiality, transparency and prejudice. In Malaysia, privacy and
confidentiality of data is the first concern of the society. The society is scared that their
personal data be falling into irresponsible hands.

Every part is playing an important role in addressing the critical ethical issues
Malaysia is facing. The effort in battling these social problems relying on big data requires
support from all the parties to ensure the strengthening of data collection as well as the
advancement of skilled workforce. Also, collaboration between statisticians and experts is

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School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

very important too. Lastly, it is also important to realize that big data is a double-edged
sword — Big Opportunity, Bigger Responsibility.

SUGGESTIONS & RECOMMENDATION

Data Anonymization

Data anonymization, or data masking is a type of information sanitization and its

intention is to protect the users. It refers to a process of either encrypting or removing
personally identifiable information from data sets so that the people’s data remain
anonymous. This is because anonymization and privacy were closely related.
Anonymization was frequently seen as the minimum requirement needed to protect data
subjects’ privacy in aggregating data in spite of the possibility of re-identification through
cross-referencing with data concerning ethnic background, locational data, other metadata,
health records or even small pieces of identified genetic data (Choudhury et al. 2014, p. 6;
Hayden 2012, p. 313; Joly et al. 2012). It must be carried out by industries dealing with
sensitive information such as the healthcare, financial and digital media industries while
promoting the integrity of data sharing. Data anonymization reduces the risk of unintended
disclosure when sharing data between countries, industries, and even departments within
the same company. For example, a hospital sharing confidential data on its patients to a
medical research lab or pharmaceutical company would be able to do so ethically if it keeps
its patients anonymous. In order to protect the patients’ identity, this can be done by
removing the names, Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, and addresses of its patients
from the shared list while leaving the important components required for medical research
like age, ailments, height, weight, gender, race and so on. By doing so, the privacy of the
patient is protected and individual feel safe. Also, the data obtained will be useless to the
culprits. In other words, when dealing with group, an ‘ethics of care’ approach must be
applied by not sharing the data to anyone or institution to avoid possibilities of discrimination.

Data anonymization techniques can be carried out with two methods. An

organization dealing with the customers’ or employees’ data could delete personally
identifiable information from its data gathered or encrypt this information with a strong
passphrase to avoid being hacked. Furthermore, it can also generalize the information
collected in its database by using categories such as choosing the category that information
is in instead of writing the information specifically. These will definitely help to protect
public’s privacy.

Besides, the developers of the social medias should emphasize the importance of
business ethics which is a specialized ethics that should be implemented according to the
moral standards as they apply to business institutions. They should clearly understand and
know the contractual rights of the users when they register an account in social medias such
as not exposing their personal information or details to the third party when there is no
agreement to this immoral act. Also, the users of the social media or applications should limit
the exposure of their sensitive personal information such as bank card, phone number,
home address if possible to prevent the hackers from stealing this information.

Access Control Policy

Unethical issue often involves bad consequences and cause harm to individuals or
society. Therefore, health data governance frameworks and policies beginning to address
and assuage such concerns should be paid attention. To avoid the ethical issue in
healthcare, access control is needed and implemented. The specific individual can access
the details of the patient and their access must be governed by an access control policy.
Access control is a type of security technique who or when can view and access the data. It
able to provides a sophisticated authorization controls in order to ensure that only the users

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School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

can access to patient’s details with the permissions. There are some models that can be
used to control the electronic health records (EHR) such as role-based access control
(RBAC) (Zhang, R., & Liu, L.2010) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) (Mohan, A.,
& Blough, D. M. 2010). Role-based access control (RBAC) is a widely used model that
restricts access to computer resources. It can reduce the administrative work and support.
RBAC is more easily integrate third-party users into the network by giving them pre-defined
roles and this may help to prevent the action of the hacker. Besides, attribute-based access
control is a technique that manages access right that are granted through the use of policies
made up of attributes working together. It may overcome the ethical issue by evaluate the
rules and policies.

Furthermore, the security team should be established in order to access the patient
records and make sure only specific individuals can access the data or information of the
patient. From here, we must also address the importance of accountability. The employees
in the healthcare industry should clearly know that it is their responsibility and accountability
to comply with the privacy framework. They should know that they cannot misuse the data or
share the patients’ data to the third party because of the benefits offered. The electronic
health record system must audit often so that it can verify who is accessing the database
and when he or she accesses the information of the patients. Transparent policies and
efficient processes are very important to enhance their accountability besides ensuring the
timely availability and quality of data. The community needs to trust in the high quality of
data if they are to inform future research, the approval of tests and drugs, and finally, the
diagnosis and treatment of patients (Thorogood A, Cook-Deegan R & Knoppers BM,
2016).The terminated employees should be removed in order to ensure that they are not
allowed to get into the system and access the patients’ information. This is very crucial as
some culprits are those ex-employees as they are very familiar with the system and how it
works. Hence, hacking into the system is very easy for them.

Profiling and Knowledge Sharing

Profiling could occur by classifying individuals into groups, intentionally or

unintentionally, while offering or restricting treatment, information or opportunities to
individuals or groups. It plays an important role in reducing the issue of digital divide. In other
word, understanding when and why one’s data have been categorised as a particular type or
a particular phenomenon is a key to reinforcing self-control of data and reducing the
inequalities of power characteristic of the Big Data divide (digital divide).

The data poor are caught in a position of weakness where the ability to understand
the data and methods used to make decisions about them as individuals and groups is
beyond their means (Andrejevic 2014; B. D. Mittelstadt, L. Floridi2015). The imbalance in
knowledge and decision-making power inherent in this setup will make the individuals
troubling. Lupton (2014) describes this situation in terms of analytic metrics used to classify
individuals and groups and highlight specific features or characteristics to understand them.
These metrics provide different ways to observe the groups, interpreting their behaviours
whether a particular interpretation is correct or reflective of the identities, meaning or
motivations given to acts by members of the group is indistinct.

Profiling is related to surveillance. It can quickly take on surveillance implications

(Bonilla 2014). The Big Data has been compared to a well-informed "transparent human",
capable of mass surveillance (Markowetz et al. 2014, p. 410). Whereas, profiling need not
be seen as a surveillance practice for concerns over profiling to be corresponding. It is the
action of interpreting the data through a particular framework of understanding or
measurement to make sense of it.

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 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

Furthermore, the perfectly anonymised datasets are still allowed for group level
ethical harms for which the identities of members of the group or profile are irrelevant (van
der Sloot 2014).The algorithmic grouping of data points and identification of statistical
relationships allows for profiling and grouping of individual data subjects. Profiling which
connects data subjects to one another, meaning the preferences, behaviours and interests
of others affect how the individual is considered in ethically relevant ways (B. D. Mittelstadt,
L. Floridi2015). Preferential decision-making and treatment in a variety of situations of
variable ethical acceptability can be justified on this basis, such as personalised pricing in e-
commerce or genetic discrimination.

Moreover, knowledge sharing is a key to tackle this unethical issue. There must be a
collaboration between developed and undeveloped or developing countries, together
tackling the challenge of representing and visualizing big data to groups or teams that
consist of people with diverse background. This is very important for the developed countries
to guide them, help them and lead them towards the new era of data literacy to reduce the
inequality. Also, they must discuss how they can make data a design material, engaging
people in the design of digital systems and data-driven services that work underlying ideally
data infrastructure.

CONCLUSION & DISCUSSION

In this paper, we discuss the current ethical issues of big data and the suggestions to
overcome those ethical issues. As time goes, big data will play an increasingly crucial role in
enabling organizations to make smarter-cum-faster business decisions. However, there are
several ethical issues related to the big data because of the practice of collecting public data.
Because of the usefulness of big data, it is targeted to be stolen or hacked by outsider. The
young generation love to upload their personal info in the social media and this will cause
the user data been found during the data mining process. Once the hacker obtains the data,
they will start using the details of the user to do unethical and illegal action such as
undertaking fraudulent transactions, applying for credit cards, counterfeiting or forging an
identity and so on.

The second ethical issue is healthcare. Patients’ data stored in the database system
is usually stolen to misuse. This will cause a desire consequence such as affects to our
country’s serenity and peace among the society. Also, we had discussed the ethical issue of
digital divide. It has caused the difficulty in accessing services delivered through the use of
modern technologies in certain areas or countries. Moreover, digital divide will generate the
issue of discrimination because some people might familiar with the tools of Internet or some
might not and this will affect large portions of a society especially in the job market. There is
an approach which is Late-BindingTM architecture. It refers to the delaying the application of
business rules so that it can provide the healthcare systems with time to revise those data.
Therefore, we can clearly see that there is an inequality between economic and social.
Difficulty in collecting data is also faced by small and medium sized companies. This is
because the small and medium sized companies do not have enough funds to purchase this
data to develop.

Obtaining a deep understanding of the ethical issues is essential to develop

appropriate and effective ways to overcome them. As for this study, we recommend data
anonymization, access control policy and profiling to solve the ethical issues discussed
above. Big data bring a lot of benefits and usage to the world. However, everyone must use
it morally and ethically to avoid harms to the individuals or society.

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 BPMN 3123 Ethic Management
School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia.

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