Matt Ranen and Steve Weber: Before doing business in big data, consider the shifting ethical landscape

Imagineyou are the product manager in Samsung or LG’s appliance division and you have decided to sell refrigerators at a discount because “the real money will come later,”by “monetizing” the stream of data that will be generatedby all the new sensors included in the design.

But what if the ability to collect proprietary data gets legally and ethically complicated, a few years down the line? Say the government imposes a limit on data collection from durable goods that are not replaced in 5 yea...