The collection and analysis of large-scale population level and individual mobility and social mixing data raises fundamental ethical questions related to privacy, individual autonomy, consent, and the distribution of power in society. Balancing those concerns with the desires of public health researchers and policy makers to learn what they need from the data is a central challenge. Ethics is a fundamentally discursive discipline and useful guidance on any of the challenges mentioned above can only result from actively engaging with a variety of perspectives and openly discussing their implications for the design and implementation of the big data-driven methods and technologies used in public health research. At the same time, ethicists must gain substantive insight into the technical details of these means if they are to identify and discuss specific concerns, and provide targeted recommendations.

In this multidisciplinary workshop, we will brainstorm new ethical challenges surrounding the collection of health-related data and also explore some concrete methods that can, for example, minimize privacy loss and mitigate avenues for social control in this area (e.g., multi-party computation, differential privacy).