By Laini Byfield
Resources and reading list
Books that support Small Data Ethics and ETHICMAP — curated for practitioners who want theory with operational teeth.
How to use this list
- Pick one privacy foundation (contextual integrity), one fairness foundation, and one governance-oriented critique.
- Use the summaries as prompts for policy and committee agendas.
- Convert insights into artifacts: rule specs, appeal standards, and repair protocols.
This list is intentionally book-only so the site remains self-contained and indexable.
Reading list
Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
Helen Nissenbaum · 2010
The canonical foundation for contextual integrity — useful for explaining why "same data, different context" can still constitute harm.
Weapons of Math Destruction
Cathy O’Neil · 2016
A practical critique of opaque scoring systems — frames explainability and contestability as ethics, not niceties.
The Ethical Algorithm
Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth · 2019
Readable introductions to fairness and privacy tradeoffs — good for translating abstract risks into design constraints.
Data Feminism
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein · 2020
A power-aware framework — helps articulate Harmony, burden, and whose interests are served by the system.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff · 2019
A macro lens on incentive structures and data extraction — useful for the Incentives step in ETHICMAP.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado Perez · 2019
Concrete examples of missing data and biased defaults — clarifies how "normal" assumptions harm subgroups in ways that aggregate statistics hide.
Algorithms of Oppression
Safiya Umoja Noble · 2018
Explains how systems encode bias — useful for governance arguments about oversight and accountability structures.
Automating Inequality
Virginia Eubanks · 2018
High-stakes human impact in administrative systems — the closest match to small-data operational consequences in the practitioner literature.