Is there a word for when a dataset is created, possibly not even intentionally but then some other group of people swoop in and analyze and apply that data in a new unexpected, strange possibly evil way?
Like taking all of the attendance data from a school and using it to predict real estate prices?
(Which happened.)
This whole idea that data sets can be repurposed, combined and used in ways that were never a part of the systems that created them without consequences is at the heart of the proposed magical prediction abilities of LLMs.
And sometimes it's neat and exciting when you find something in data you didn't expect. But there are other artifacts based on the original purpose of the data sets, you know?
@futurebird Maybe something either academically upstream or downstream of danah boyd @zephoria and Kate Crawford ( @Katecrawford ?)'s 2012 paper "Critical Questions For Big Data"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878
section 5. "Just Because it is Accessible Doesn’t Make it Ethical"
(preprint with a slightly different title is PDF-available: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/nrjhn_v1 )
?
Also it looks like danah boyd has a new book published *checks watch* within the past month, that certainly looks relevant to the second question, and possibly the first:
"Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census", danah boyd (2026)
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo277581183.html
@gaditb @futurebird there is no word because there is no framework for understanding the transgression. the West understands data as “belonging to” [framed as intellectual property] the people who collected it, not the communities from which it was collected. we do not have a concept of intellectual property which belongs to communities and covers the information that comes from them, so we cannot name a transgression when that information is wielded against those communities.
this has been a topic of discourse re: legal studies re: traditional knowledges and “development” of the Global South since at least the 90s. the Big Data angle is just one particularity, and not even a particularly urgent one in the face of biopiracy and paywalling of traditional learning materials. but i would start my research there instead of reading Western Internet Scholars, who probably lack the means to even conceptualize what is really going on considering Western Society does not even register this as a problem
