Liu, 1

Benjamin Liu

Kantor

PWR 2

7 June, 2021

Vision Statement: Team Principles that Encourage Mindful and Ethical Treatment of Sensitive

Information

In the summer following my freshman year, I worked at a fintech startup named

Fanvestor to build out the first version of their data management pipeline. Specifically, my work

automated the process of storing, transferring, and visualizing customer information. Prior to my

start date, I was beaming with excitement to play a small, but critical role in the company’s

mission to empower individual investors.

Around a week into my internship, however, any remaining excitement that I had was

replaced with a sense of unease when I was placed in an online call with the company’s sole data

vendor. During the meeting, I was handed a comprehensive spreadsheet of customer information.

Each row in the spreadsheet represented one customer, while more than 30 columns covered

personal information ranging from “number of past jobs” to “frequent internet searches”. The

first time I analyzed the spreadsheet, I remember asking myself a series of concerning questions,

“Am I allowed to access this information? What if I know someone on this list? Do companies

really have access to our search history?” The presence of sensitive information complemented

with the lack of any strict protocols to handle it made me uncomfortable. I hesitated to raise these
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questions to my manager for the fear of facing retaliation, and I continuously nodded as he

issued project instructions.

Despite the concerns I shared, it wasn’t until several months later that I was able to

properly reflect on them. In the winter of my sophomore year, I joined the Stanford Machine

Learning Group (SMLG) to conduct research on a special class of satellite images. Similar to

customer information, many of these images contain private military bases and other land

artifacts that the government had given us special permission to analyze. Reflecting on the

differences between these two experiences, specifically in how my respective leaders fostered

their work environments and communicated with team members, has provided me with three

important insights concerning how team-specific principles can encourage mindful and ethical

treatment of sensitive information. Since I aspire to pursue a career that interfaces with analyzing

sensitive data, these reflections are especially relevant to me.

Sessions specifically dedicated to covering best practices for handling sensitive

information and evaluating collective concerns are paramount to encouraging the mindful

treatment of sensitive information. During my time in SMLG, we dedicated regular 15-minute

sessions to read data agreement policies, discuss how our methods conformed with these

policies, and raise questions about existing norms. These sessions were integral to providing a

comfortable environment for team members to raise concerns and unified the group toward

aligning research methods with ethical data practices. My very first lab meeting portrays this

concept effectively. During this meeting, I was surprised to see an undergrad question the design

of a Ph.D. student’s experiment, one that unknowingly violated the terms of image processing
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outlined by our government collaborators. During this lab exchange, team members shared their

respective concerns before a consensus was reached on a reasonable solution. Similar versions of

this conversation played out through the months, as the lab manager would frequently propose

methods that ambiguously interacted with sensitive data principles and held discussions from the

team to collectively move forward. These experiences not only gave me comfort in questioning

decisions, but unified the team by emphasizing the nature of equal voices in such discussions.

Ultimately, the lack of these qualities discouraged me from raising similar questions during my

time at Fanvestor.

Another important component of encouraging the ethical treatment of sensitive

information is the installation of guiding principles and their common use-cases. These written

foundations ultimately help ground individuals in the face of difficult decisions while setting

strict precedents for future actions. My time at Fanvestor highlights the importance of this

component. During my analysis of customer information, I regularly faced cognitive dissonance

over whether my actions were safe or compliant with general ethics. The company had no

guidelines for interns to handle sensitive information nor any guiding documentation on core

practices. Thus, I often found myself extremely uncomfortable when, for example, a data-

manipulation task required me to download customer information on my personal device.

Similarly, since I lacked any guideline on designing experiments around the safe handling of

data, l resorted to omitting the consideration altogether. In sharp contrast, SMLG keeps a dense

set of documents to guide researchers on ways to design experiments while complying with safe

data practices. In complement to these guidelines, a running set of examples of common

problems are consistently updated to minimize the gap between theory and practice. This
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infrastructure gave me strong direction in how to properly handle sensitive information and

guided me in a variety of practical contexts.

In tandem with guiding principles, a healthy precedent to opposing the views of authority

figures is crucial in encouraging team members to pursue proper ways of handling sensitive

information. In the case of SMLP, this idea is promoted by the lab manager motto, “Challenge

anything and speak your mind,” and exemplified by healthy discourse seen in lab meetings.

Since undergrads are actively encouraged to ask questions and challenge the assumptions of their

mentors, lapses of judgement are often corrected well before deployment and members are

comfortable in voicing their discomfort. According to Peter Block, this mindset encourages the

advent of inversion to develop, in which citizens of a collective community become the driving

force of progress. Team environments consequently shift to focus on the debate of questions of

concern, in which every individual citizen can equally contribute to the discussion.

Although the three principles we’ve discussed thus far deal specifically with encouraging

the ethical treatment of sensitive information, they apply broadly to building communities that

are sensitive to important issues that are overlooked by standard working protocols. As I reflect

on my experiences in both SMLP and Fanvestor, I hope to not only recognize these principles

but also advocate for them wherever my career takes me. I’ve realized that embodying a global

citizen in these contexts involves inverting traditional team dynamics, contributing to a space for

team members’ concerns to flourish into action, and asking as many questions as I can.