Ethics of Big Data: Integrated Framework for Big Data Application in Russian and European Contexts

An increasing amount of publications in the sphere of ethical challenges of big data signify a continuous increasing concern for this issue. Ethical debate: what is “appropriate” and what is “not appropriate” for one organization and for others is normative and subjective in nature, just like information privacy and security norms may differ from country to country, and from culture to culture. This paper is devoted to Big Data application ethical risks analysis, which vary in different countries depending on legal aspects and information privacy of individuals. It should be admitted that with the rapidly increasing size and scope of information that big data technologies can provide businesses nowadays, maintaining an ethical framework may benefit from a clear understanding of vocabulary for discussing issues of coherent and consistent practices, as far as most fatal difficulties recently are connected with considerable confusion and uncertainty in the definitions of main concepts, their research structure, essential characteristics and components. The discussion of ethics of Big Data has the potential to inform both individuals and organization on the resort of the benefits big data provides and the potential risks from unintended consequences of the inappropriate usage of Big Data. In the absence of a common vocabulary and framework for discussion, individuals revert to their own moral codes. To simplify the acceptance of Big Data we propose the framework that unites the ethical issues related to implementing of Big Data. It is based on the classification of all ethical issues discussed in recent scientific papers in the area of Big Data and Cloud Computing Services and is tested, evaluated, altered and specified based on the results of the sociological survey.