Trusted Smart Statistics and the need for new ethical principles

Abstract

The changing environment in a datafied society pushes the statistical world into a long-distance race where the final line is never reached because the path is continuously moving along the way. Many countries all over the world are searching for new approaches, new tools, skills and new possible roles for the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs). Horizontal issues are essential to address properly these changes. The first one is the access to Big Data (including Internet of Things – IoT) and the legislative framework and ethical principles related to such access. The second one is to communicate these principles to the citizens and to inform about the statistical treatment of the data from these new sources. The pandemic situation has increased even more the use of these data and opened questions on their uses. Some members of the European Statistical System (ESS) have already elaborated different ethical codes and even ethical assessment tools, which could be overlapped or/and complement the European Statistics Code of practice (ESCP). In parallel, under different projects and groups in the ESS and in the European Commission (related with the EU Data Strategy) some principles have been proposed along with recommendations, some fall under ethical behaviour. The European Statistics Code of Practice has just been updated in 2017, however, this changing environment is demanding new rules and principles that could be incorporated in the Code or even in an amended Regulation 223/2009 on European Statistics. In this paper we analyse the existing ethical principles for Big Data uses (in a broad sense) and under different scenarios and compare them with the current statistical principles. We will try to go even further and think into the future about what kind of principles we would need if we add new roles to the NSIs.