Data ethics in practice: rethinking scale, trust, and autonomy

Ethics as practice in data-driven contexts refers to ways of organizing, acting with, relating to, or contesting data. The use of data within urban settings provides a number of specific contexts and practices, intersecting and transcending what might be considered ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ dynamics. Data-based governance, management, and civic engagement are deeply embedded into the function and experience of cities, raising issues of justice that require considerations of meaning that cut across scale, since issues of justice are temporally dispersed and contextually specific. Ethnographic methods can surface a range of possibilities for understanding issues of data justice across these contexts and scales. Areas of practice with ethical and justice implications include: commercial practices of data-based companies; participatory and civic data-gathering and engagement processes, including data activism; and community- or commons-based data governance strategies. A future data ethics can move away from responsive actions set within frameworks set by existing powerful actors and towards attention to implications across scale and time, producing and drawing from dynamics of resistance, resilience, and community strength. This chapter outlines a multiscalar data ethics in practice, using examples to illustrate the processes of trust and autonomy modelled through practices of ethics including governance, management, and civic engagement.