Digital data is an increasing and continual presence across the sites, activities and relationships of everyday life. In this article we explore what data presence means for the ways that the everyday is organised, sensed, and anticipated. While digital data studies have demonstrated how data is deeply entangled with the way in which everyday life is lived out and valued, at the same time our relationships with data are riddled with anxieties or small niggles or tricky trade-offs and their use is often chaotic and muddled, part of the inevitable uncertainty about what will happen next. If the presence of data is part of the environments we inhabit, this raises the question of how and why data is valuable to us and what forms of hope and trust enable this value to further develop.
In this article, we argue for an ethics of big data that is embedded in the emergent processes through which data are made, interpreted, and mobilized in mundane everyday contexts and examine how this could potentially be played out in research practice. We situate this as a response to a current crisis in accountability that has arisen in the context of the use of digital data to inform societal interventions, which we propose calls for a future-oriented anthropological ethics situated in the ongoingness of life. Such a standpoint offers a revised approach to temporality and attends to the ethics of intervening and engaging with the uncertainty of what is as yet unknown rather than simply with an ethics of the past. It offers us an opportunity to think differently about big data and ethics and to create an alternative ethics for big data and their analysis.
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