The AEGIS project made public two deliverables addressing big data related ethical issues in the project. The documents are of high relevance for all research projects working with big data. The AEGIS deliverable titled D9.3 – GEN- Requirement N° 4 “Ethics Advisory Board’s Report” reports the Ethics Advisory Board (EAB)’s activities, assessment and recommendations. The AEGIS EAB was formed through subcontracting external experts, for monitoring of the legal issues to continuously assess and ensure that the framework is proposed in the project adheres to a minimum set of ethical and legal requirements. The document outlines EAB’s findings in terms of compliance of project activities and outcomes with applicable national and EU regulations, as well as with ethical standards.
After an insight on the positioning of the document within AEGIS internal environment, the document contains the findings of the ethics evaluation based on the assessment methodology depicted in AEGIS deliverable D9.1, both at a project level and in each of the demonstrators. The document continues with the description of the ethics-related work conducted by the members of the EAB and by the AEGIS partners.
The EAB experts agree that the AEGIS Consortium is dealing in a proper manner with the privacy and data protection issues, as well as with the ethical and societal dimensions of the action. The system design took privacy and ethics issues into appropriate account, by operating a balancing operation between ethical, privacy and data protection requirements and the requirements of different nature (e.g. usability requirements, economic requirements). The “need to know basis” principle and Privacy by Design and by Default approaches were followed in designing the technical solutions, in conjunction with the proportionality principle.
