Human Rights in the Big Data World

Ethical approach to human rights conceives and evaluates law through the underlying value concerns. This paper examines human rights after the introduction of big data using an ethical approach to rights. First, the central value concerns such as equity, equality, sustainability and security are derived from the history of digital technological revolution. Then, the properties and characteristics of big data are analyzed to understand emerging value concerns such as accountability, transparency, tracability, explainability and disprovability. Using these value points, this paper argues that big data calls for two types of evaluations regarding human rights. The first is the reassessment of existing human rights in the digital sphere predominantly through right to equality and right to work. The second is the conceptualization of new digital rights such as right to privacy and right against propensity-based discrimination. The paper concludes that as we increasingly share the world with intelligence systems, these new values expand and modify the existing human rights paradigm.