Approaching Ethical Guidelines for Data Scientists

Abstract

The goal of this article is to inspire data scientists to participate in the debate on the impact that their professional work has on society, and to become active in public debates on the digital world as data science professionals. How do ethical principles (e.g. fairness, justice, beneficence and non-maleficence) relate to actual situations in our professional lives? What lies in our responsibility as professionals by our expertise in the field? More specifically, this article makes an appeal to statisticians that may neither consider themselves data scientists, nor what they do data science, to join that debate, and to be part of the community that establishes data science as a proper profession in the sense of Airaksinen (2009), a philosopher working on professional ethics. As we will argue, data science has one of its roots in statistics but also contains additional tasks and features that extend it. To shape the future of statistics, and to take responsibility for the statistical contributions to data science, statisticians should actively engage in the discussions. In Sect. 10.1, the term data science is defined, and the technical changes that have led to a strong influence of data science on society are outlined. In Sect. 10.2, the systematic approach from Commission Nationale Informatique & Liberte (2018) is introduced. Along the lines of that approach, prominent examples are given for ethical issues arising from the work of data scientists. In Sect. 10.3, we provide reasons why data scientists should engage in shaping morality around data science and to formulate codes of conduct and codes of practice for data science professionals. In Sect. 10.4, we present established ethical guidelines for the related fields of statistics and computing science. Section 10.5 describes the necessary steps in the community to develop professional ethics for data science. Finally in Sect. 10.6, we motivate our own engagement and give our starting statement for the debate: Data science is in the focal point of current societal development. Without becoming a profession with professional ethics, data science will fail in building trust in its interaction with and its much-needed contributions to society!