Ethics in the Governance of Data and Digital Technology: An Analysis of European Data Regulations and Policies

Abstract

Addressing ethical concerns is among the fundamental motivations for the development of policies and regulations for data and digital technologies. In the last few years, the European Commission has issued a number of policies, regulations and legislative proposals for socially desirable and legally compliant data governance for technologies which have ethical implications. What is not obvious, however, is whether and in what way ethics are included explicitly in the way 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, remain unclear.