A Little Legal Handbook for Data and Computer Scientists
Why do this Little Legal Handbook?
At its very heart, the Law provides written coded instructions for human compiling and implementing for what is deemed as innately fair by our human moral compass – our sense of sense of “justice” for settling any conflict or harm that threatens our daily happiness. Societies in the past would use caveman clubs and royal sepulchers but today we use gavels in courtrooms to settle tensions ranging from business fraud to targeted drone strikes.
At this time, data and computer scientists have amassed human-engineered data to a scale that is unprecedented in the entirety of human history. This is indeed a remarkable feat and yet, as a profession, we might possibly have been ignoring a critical need to align such feats with the moral compass within each of us to responsibly address the social challenges in our world today. As data scientists in the 21st century, we are so often busy optimizing machine learning and neural network models, web scraping and spinning up EMR clusters in each digital universe of our own creation, we may tend to pay little attention to some real-world legal issues that often arise within our computer-based and math driven profession.
As a newly-minted data scientist, I too wonder what legal issues might have an affect as I may work on optimizing models for artificial intelligence in business as well as practice law. With my career knowledge as an attorney, it is my hope that this Mini Handbook will give my fellow technical professionals a basic understanding of how the law works here in San Francisco and the rest of the world. Moreover, to do good to the many who will use our data and software, I present the current ethical, moral, and legal challenges that a data and computer scientists are presently encountering in search for a consensus of agreeable conduct that could reliably be enforced online.
The Mini Handbook is organized in three primary sections that all highlight a few instances of how I see the law can most often creep into the life of a data and computer scientist, and would thus be good to know to avoid creating some unintended human chaos. A fourth, bonus section strives unravel the often-intertwined concepts in ethics, law, and morality for developers, data, and computer scientists. So this Little Handbook is divided in these sections:
- Legal Stuff 101
- Data Science Careers & Gigs in the Legal World
- Freelance Consulting Contract Breakdown
- Ethics Sidebar
And remember - good data comes from good people.
Rafael Victor Baca, Esquire, M.S. Data Science ©2017 – San Francisco, California. All rights reserved.