I think we can all agree that data science is growing in importance and popularity as a means to increase insight into and meaningful interaction with customers. The use of personal information and browsing histories are common inputs for recommendation engines. However, the technology has evolved to include a very subversive tool in efforts to more efficiently market to you: YOU.
Marketers conceive of marketing campaigns all the time. Sometimes, if they have access to a Data Scientist, they test the campaign before rolling it out. Let's say the campaign is a holiday coupon, either 10% or 20% off. The Data Scientist would conceive of a basic experiment to determine whether profits are higher with the 10% or 20% coupon, and Marketing would decide which discount to offer based on the outcome. Sounds innocuous. Right? Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. I'll explain.
In the pharma/biotech industry, experiments are subject to regulations, are sanctioned by government entities and are overseen by ethics and acceptable use committees. This provides the necessary control to prevent unnecessary and potentially harmful experimentation on humans.
In business, and increasingly in consumer marketing, there is a distinct lack of this control. Meaning that companies with access to data can experiment on consumers without the oversight applied to the health sciences. This becomes even more important when we consider that digital marketing efforts are now experimenting on and exploiting what can arguably be called psychological vulnerabilities such as subverting an individual's decision making process by presenting them with an ad that contains the consumer's likeness (i.e., the person depicted in the ad is morphed to look like the consumer). And all this can be done using private information and individuals' likenesses from sites on which pictures are posted such as Facebook.
Should Data Scientists and Marketers be held to a higher standard than they are currently? If they are manipulating consumers and testing on them, perhaps some sort of oversight or code of ethics is in order.
