Ethics in the Governance of Data and Digital Technology
The development of data and digital technology policies often addresses ethical concerns, with the European Commission issuing multiple regulations to ensure socially desirable and legally compliant governance. This paper examines eight key documents to understand how ethics, often framed as human rights, underpin these policies and their implementation approaches. While the EU’s data governance policies are grounded in ethical principles and practical challenges.
Abstract
Addressing ethical concerns is among the fundamental motivations for developing policies and regulations for data and digital technologies. In the last few years, the European Commission has issued several policies, regulations, and legislative proposals for socially desirable and legally compliant data governance for technologies with ethical implications. However, What could be more obvious is whether and in what way ethics are included explicitly in how these policies and regulations are created and implemented to address data governance challenges. Given the increasing amount of available digital data, its use for AI and other purposes and the growing amount of regulatory activity around data, this paper explores the role ethics plays in these documents. We examined eight of these documents to map the ethical concerns and justifications underlining their provisions, the ethical principles they promote and the implementation approaches recommended. Our analysis shows that the current EU data governance policy landscape can be read from an ethical perspective as being grounded in ethical thinking, typically expressed in terms of human rights, aware of likely concerns, based on well-established principles, and in the process of being codified in regulation, legislation, and institutions. However, the practical implementation of these principles, for instance, how conflicts among these principles can be resolved, remains to be seen.
Results
The paper examines eight European Commission documents to understand how ethical concerns are integrated into data governance policies and regulations.
It finds that these documents are grounded in ethical thinking, often articulated through the lens of human rights.
The analysis shows that the policies are based on well-established ethical principles, codified into regulations, legislation, and institutions.
Despite the ethical grounding, the paper notes that the practical implementation of these principles, such as resolving conflicts among them, still needs to be seen.
The study highlights the need for more straightforward guidelines on how ethical principles should be applied to address data governance challenges effectively.
Conclusion
The paper concludes that ethical concerns are a fundamental motivation behind developing European data and digital technology policies and regulations.
It highlights that the European Commission has actively issued policies and legislative proposals to ensure socially desirable and legally compliant data governance.
The analysis reveals that while ethics are considered in these documents, the explicit inclusion and implementation of ethical principles in addressing data governance challenges are only sometimes explicit.
The paper identifies that the EU data governance policy landscape is grounded in ethical thinking, often expressed in terms of human rights, and is aware of potential concerns.
It notes that these policies are based on well-established principles and are in the process of being codified into regulation, legislation, and institutions.
However, the paper points out that the practical implementation of these ethical principles, such as resolving conflicts among them, remains to be seen and needs further exploration.
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