Ethics of Biomedical Big Data. Part 2: Luciano Floridi

Professor Luciano Floridi discussed the ethics of biomedical big data at the Oxford Internet Institute in April 2015. According to Floridi, the collection, storage, and analysis of big data constitutes a new class of economic asset that is a non-rival resource, given its renewable and repurposeable character. In 2011, big data contributed 25.1 billion to the UK economy and is forecasted to supply 40.7 billion by 2017. However, big data does incur costs in terms of curation, storage, analytics, accessibility, as well as ethics, given the identification of small, but sensitive patterns in data. Floridi concludes by discussing the merits of the EU General Data Protection Regulation in this context.