Ethical Data Handling
From IIW
Session Topic: Ethical Data Handling: What is it? What are the obstacles? What is success?
Tuesday 3E
Convener: Robin Wilton
Notes-taker(s): Robin Wilton
Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered: Personal data, ethics, privacy, harm
Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
We used four topics relating to personal data processing, as a framework for the discussion:
- The principle of “no surprises” (if users found out what you were doing with their data, would they be unpleasantly surprised?)
- The idea of “ethical dilution” (that the more data passes from one controller to another, the less responsible any of them feels towards the data subject)
- Ethical issues in multi-stakeholder cases
- Ethical issues in multi-context cases
Some ethical factors appeared across several topics – for instance,
- User expectations, and informedness
- Predictability and determinism, and their role as a trust factor
- Power imbalances (including economic imbalances)
- Cost/risk assessment, harm as a privacy metric
