Ethics-aware data governance (Vision Paper)

The number of datasets available to legal practitioners, policy makers, scientists, and many other categories of citizens is growing at an unprecedented rate. Ethics-aware data processing has become a pressing need, considering that data are often used within critical decision processes (e.g., staff evaluation, college admission, criminal sentencing). The goal of this paper is to propose a vision for the injection of ethical principles (fairness, non-discrimination, transparency, data protection, diversity, and human interpretability of results) into the data analysis lifecycle (source selection, data integration, and knowledge extraction) so as to make them first-class requirements. In our vision, a comprehensive checklist of ethical desiderata for data protection and processing needs to be developed, along with methods and techniques to ensure and verify that these ethically motivated requirements and related legal norms are fulfilled throughout the data selection and exploration processes. Ethical requirements can then be enforced at all the steps of knowledge extraction through a unified data modeling and analysis methodology relying on appropriate conceptual and technical tools.