Political Studies Association, Media and Politics Group Conference: Media and Politics in the Age of Crisis and Change Ethics and the culture of data: The help and hindrance of modern political philosophy Amber Macintyre There is a crisis in which the risks of the culture of data cannot be effectively mitigated. This paper will describe how this will prevail until there is a better understanding of data practices and impact. This paper will then propose how the delegate and trustee models of representative democracy can provide a framework for understanding what decisions are being made about data, and what best practice could look like. This paper will then explore the problems with this framework. The conclusion reveals questions that will be asked of an ongoing ethnographic study. The Culture of Data “Out with every theory of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” (WIRED, 2008). There is a culture of data that has developed since the 1960s. The culture is associated with the development of physical technologies created to collect, compare and analyse data to identify patterns (boyd and Crawford, 2012; Lyon, 2015; Couldry, 2014). A culture is not defined by physical technologies however, but by the social and political dimensions. In this case, there is a faith in data to provide a higher level of knowledge about anything and everything. The importance of the power and control that it is believed data holds can be seen in the common analogies drawn with law and oil. These grand claims are based on three key attributes of the culture of data. Firstly, data plays an increasingly foundational role in claims to authority influencing corporate, governmental and civil society agendas (Couldry, 2014: Dijck, 2014). Secondly, there is a purported self-evident relationship between data and reality which reframes how knowledge is formed (boyd and Crawford, 2012; Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013; Raley 2013). Lastly, there are rituals that surround data that have become normalised across industries: investments in data scientists and capacities, the championing of data institutions, and the popularity of datafication processes (Dijck, 2014). In short, the definition of the culture of data is as follows: an approach which puts physical data technologies at the centre of claims to authority with the faith that this will provide greater knowledge and lead to better decision making. Personal Data Traditionally, personal data relates to an individual, however to recognise the mass data collection technologies which now exist (Lyon, 2015) this research defines the term as relating to an individual or group. This data is used to measure the personality, activities, behaviour, opinions and preferences of the individual or group. Personal data has experienced an unprecedented growth in availability, variety, depth and scope over the last ten years. Personal data is generated by and collected from various places including, but certainly not limited to, social media activity, website activities, travel and bank cards, insurance records, the electoral register and more traditional formats such as opinion surveys and focus groups. As storage techniques have improved there has been a shift towards archiving web pages, images and files which means the data is not just of current activities, but also from the past.