Discussion 3 Data Science becomes more and more popular especially for my work field – Education. Students get excited about it because learning it will helps them find jobs. Company get excited about it because the data can tell really good and reliable stories to persuade their customers or their management groups. However, we should have data Ethics awareness for data. There are a lot of biases in a data analytics. Some of them are unknown, some of them are reinforced by human, and so on. The biases could happen at any step from collecting data to analyzing data.
For Our recommender system, I think we can not trust their recommendations fully. Most companies recommend their featured products for you mostly for the business not caring about your well beings. Or like Pandora radio I used before. When I put one singer that I like, it would generate the station of similar songs or singers for me. It was great but then I started to hear some songs like new popular songs repeatdly play in the station. I realize that it may not about the way I like, it is more about marketing for the songs. Mostly, we assume that popular songs may do a better job in the marketing to repeat themselves to increase the awareness. So as we learned Item-item collaborating filtering system, it depends on the human who is monitoring the codes to decide what to recommend you. Same example, if your music taste having a little bit similarity with the popular songs they want to enforce to recommend you, they will recommend to you.
I think recommender system can prevent unethical issues but it depends on how people use it. Without the thinking of making money, if they just want to make customers happy, the recommender system will be a great tool to serve people. However, this is not reality. We are seeing a lot of companies try to make their customers’ lives easier and also make money, like Amazon. They recommend stuff for you probably just because you googled it by accident or browse the items in their site, and they also keep showing you the similar products or the same products over and over again in your social media account. I think it invades people’s privacy but meanwhile, they also give you the fastest and convinient service in the planet. So that’s why I think recommer system is a good tool to advertise the products but just don’t abuse it.