Data at the Crossroads of Congress and Ethics

There’s a classic divide between Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley. Tech companies speak a different language and are moving at light-speed. Rachel Post, a former business journalist in Silicon Valley and former VP of Branded Content at Guardian Labs US, explores the boundaries and intersections of data and ethics. Many media outlets have their own proprietary analytics software to track exactly where people click on a page, how far they scroll, where they go next and where they came from…allowing for real-time shifts in headlines and photos to meet the immediate demands of reader interests. The user experience is crafted on the spot by algorithms and technology. From Facebook to autonomous vehicles, we’re navigating the ethics surrounding data collection real-time as new technologies and ways of collecting data are invented. It goes beyond what data is collected – to how it’s collected, who collects it and has access to it and where it’s stored.