Promoting Ethical Awareness in Communication Analysis: Investigating Potentials and Limits of Visual Analytics for Intelligence Applications
Maximilian T. Fischer, Simon David Hirsbrunner, Wolfgang Jentner, Matthias Miller, Daniel A. Keim, Paula Helm · 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · 2022
Digital systems for analyzing human communication data have become prevalent in recent years. This may be related to the increasing abundance of data that can be harnessed but can hardly be managed manually. Intelligence analysis of communications data in investigative journalism, criminal intelligence, and law present particularly interesting cases, as they must take into account the often highly sensitive properties of the underlying operations and data. At the same time, these are areas where increasingly automated, sophisticated approaches and tailored systems can be particularly useful and relevant, especially in terms of Big Data manageability. However, by the shifting of responsibilities, this also poses dangers. In addition to privacy concerns, these dangers relate to uncertain or poor data quality, leading to discrimination and potentially misleading insights. Other problems relate to a lack of transparency and traceability, making it difficult to accurately identify problems and determine appropriate remedial strategies.