We like to believe it was once easy to distinguish authentic images from those doctored for a political purpose. We recall an age of so few news sources that none of them were fake. The rose-tinted glasses that enable our nostalgia to hide an important enduring lesson: the most important things you can learn about your data, you cannot learn from your data.
Thankfully, salvation is at hand if we only pay more attention to the second word in "data science". The scientific method is more than a technique for generating hypotheses to A/B test, it offers everything we need to use data responsibly, regardless of which algorithms are in fashion. In this talk, I share practical knowledge drawn from a background in social science, which can help any practitioner embed ethics in their daily work.