Oaths and the ethics of automated data: limits to porting the Hippocratic oath from medicine to data science

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the proposal for a ‘Hippocratic oath for data science’ is a severely limited form of data ethics for automated culture. Drawing on the oath used within medical professionalism, proponents as diverse as Wired and the European Data Protection Supervisor have argued for a Hippocratic oath for data science as a way of introducing a soft regulatory environment. In this paper, we analyse the history of the Hippocratic oath and the professions of medicine and data science to suggest that this proposal offers an individualized solution to systemic problems and, as such, is unlikely to be effective. We further argue that the proposal of the Hippocratic oath ignores the degree to which the profession of the physician is different from the profession of the data scientist in ways that limit the transfer of an ethical framework between them. In particular, we note that automated data access leads to a lack of clear professional identity among those who act as data stewards which, unlike in a medical context, makes it unclear how breaches of an oath would be adequately sanctioned. We also argue that, unlike in a medical context, harms can be difficult to define and have historically been poorly acknowledged, making it difficult to meaningfully take an oath to ‘do no harm’. We propose that in the context of data science, a Hippocratic oath would provide little substantial protection for users and largely penalize workers over companies while deferring responsibility away from those profiting from data extraction. The paper concludes by suggesting that the limits of the Hippocratic oath are significant to the point that other regulations should also be sought, although proposals for oaths have value as catalysts for cultural change within the technology industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Data ethics
• Hippocratic oath
• employment in data science
• social media
• platform responsibilities
• platform governance and regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, Lasagna’s influential version includes a pledge to ‘preserve the finest traditions of my calling’ (Eva 2014).

2 Despite longstanding advice to integrate ethics training across programmes, ethics content is largely taught only in specialised courses (Grosz et al. 2019, Raj et al. 2019, p. 84, Fiesler et al. 2020) and content about legal and ethical issues in data science textbooks remains scant (Raj et al. 2019, p. 79).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Mannell

Kate Mannell is a Research Fellow at Deakin University in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Her research examines the design, governance, and use of digital platforms with a focus on the role of digital technologies in the lives of families and young people. Her other research interests include digital disconnection and mobile media. She has recently published work in M/C Journal, Journalism Studies, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Mobile Media and Communication.

Robbie Fordyce

Robbie Fordyce is from Aotearoa and is Lecturer in Big Data/Quantitative Analytics and Research Methods at the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. He researches the exploits, manipulations and politics of rule-based systems and their cultures. In 2021, he published articles in Continuum, The International Journal of Children's Rights, Games and Culture, and other venues.

Suneel Jethani

Suneel Jethani is a Lecturer in Digital and Social Media at the University of Technology Sydney. His research focuses on embodied technology, datafication, and its relation to ethics, governance, and design. Suneel has published in International Communication Gazette, M/C Journal, Communication, Politics & Culture, and Continuum and he is the author of The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking (Emerald, 2021) and Openness in Practice (Palgrave, 2021).