Towards Integrating Human Values into Software: Mapping Principles and Rights of GDPR to Values

Abstract

Software has become an integral part of human life. This gives rise to the need of developing software that respects human values such as transparency, fairness and privacy. Software that compromises on human values (e.g. privacy) can affect people's reputation and impinges on their ability to function in society with the usual freedom and autonomy. Integrating human values into software is, however, a challenging task due to its imprecise and subjective nature. Enforcing regulations is one way to make software development considerate of the desired standards and values. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on software is one such effort to protect EU citizens' data and personal information. GDPR prescribes data protection principles and data subject rights mainly to protect user privacy. Looking beyond privacy, we studied GDPR to identify the extent to which it covers human values. We mapped GDPR's data protection principles and data subject rights to a widely accepted human values structure adopted from social sciences. Our results show that GDPR addresses not only privacy but also several other human values including power, security and universalism. Moreover, fairness and transparency stand out as the most value-conscious principles prescribed in GDPR.