Ethics for Data Projects

The Global Data Ethics Project, or GDEP for short, is an ethical framework and set of principles created for data practitioners as part of Data for Democracy.

The framework is built upon five ethics such as Fairness, Openness, Reliability, Trust, and Social Benefit covering concepts of privacy, transparency, consent, bias, diversity and ethical imagination.

Global Data Ethics Principles,

Consider (if not collect) informed and purposeful consent of data subjects for all projects, and discard resulting data when that consent expires.
Make best effort to guarantee the security of data, subjects, and algorithms to prevent unauthorized access, policy violations, tampering, or other harm or actions outside the data subjects’ consent.
Make best effort to protect anonymous data subjects, and any associated data, against any attempts to reverse-engineer, de-anonymize, or otherwise expose confidential information.
Practice responsible transparency as the default where possible, throughout the entire data life cycle.
Foster diversity by making efforts to ensure inclusion of participants, representation of viewpoints and communities, and openness. The data community should be open to, welcoming of, and inclusive of people from diverse backgrounds.
Acknowledge and mitigate unfair bias throughout all aspects of data work.
Hold up data sets with clearly established provenance as the expected norm, rather than the exception.
Respect relevant tensions of all stakeholders as it relates to privacy and data ownership.
Take great care to communicate responsibly and accessibly.
Ensure that all data practitioners take responsibility for exercising ethical imagination in their work, including considering the implication of what came before and what may come after, and actively working to increase benefit and prevent harm to others.

For more information on Data ethics project visit datafordemocracy.org