Data, Ethics and Law

The widespread use of digital data in society in combination with very powerful tools for its analysis leads to a number of ethical issues. The discipline of data science also raises several legal issues. You should develop the skill of identifying the relevant legal regulations. How can we make a legal analysis about whether different tools in data science comply with the legislation? What are the differences and overlapping between the protection of personal data and the protection of personal privacy? How is intellectual property protected, e.g. how do you legally protect a machine learning tool? How has data science as a whole affected the development of legislation and why, namely, what interests have become important to protect because of the new possibilities to process data? How do you balance the interests of the different actors? And, how do you solve liability issues? The course introduces relevant ethical theories and provides a background in legal aspects.