Legal & Ethical Issues – Press Release

The contribution of this deliverable is threefold. It aims to:

1. Identify key legal and ethical issues that may arise through the development by the WeGov Consortium and use of the Toolset by decision makers/policy makers (referred to throughout this section as ‘Policy Makers’);

2. To provide, where possible, recommendations or suggestions based on published best practice guidelines;

3. To apply the above elements to particular use cases provided by the Scenario Partners namely GESIS, Gov2u, and Hansard Society.

This deliverable concluded that ethical considerations are both important and embedded in the WeGov Consortium’s approach to the project and that ethical considerations may be considered to have three temporal stages in this project. Although ethical considerations are difficult to scope and require careful management, the primary focus of ILAWS research here can be said to lie in privacy considerations. Although there is no obviously-applicable formal ethical code applicable to the WeGov Toolset, it is considered that the following should be noted: (i) the ongoing consideration of ethical considerations as part of the WeGov risk analysis process (e.g. the Consortium has already designated an Ethical Officer), and; (ii) the need to consider how end users (Policy Makers) of the Toolset might be prompted to give due consideration to ethical concerns in planning to use the Toolset1. It is concluded that the aspirational nature of ethics means that the most reasonable method of addressing ethical concerns in the WeGov project is to ensure that the expectations of SNS end-users are respected: this is most effectively done by mechanisms of active consent being in place before SNS users participate in deployment of the Toolset (by the Scenario Partners or the Policy Makers).

Recommendations:

o The use of active consent mechanisms before SNS users participate in

deployment of the Toolset. Where this is not the case, it is considered that the risks of unethical behaviour can be reduced by (i) seeking prior authorisation from a national data protection authority (ii) ensuring that user generated content is being targeted from public SNS fora and is not targeted to individuals; (iii) avoiding the processing of any personal data, and/or carrying out a review of ethical (and legal) issues (see footnote 166, below), and;

1 This could be addressed by contract: a requirement that end users have regard to legal and ethical considerations in the use of the Toolset. A more onerous requirement might be to insist that end users undertake a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) in planning how to use the Toolset.

o The lack of an appropriate ethical regime and the relative dearth of best

practice is not particular to the use of sentiment mining and associated technologies as applied to political opinions, it is true of the commercial use of such technologies, also . ILAWS would suggest that there is scope for the development of an EU federation or organisation of sentiment-mining organisations, with the aim of establishing best practice (including ethical best practice) in sentiment mining and associated technologies.

o Privacy and Data Protection: It is concluded that privacy and data

protection concerns form the primary legal (and ethical) challenges to be managed in the WeGov project. Having, in particular, noted the particular sensitivity of political opinion within the applicable regulatory regime and the particular concerns posed by ‘scraping’ where there is no explicit SNS user consent , the importance of a robust approach to addressing data protection and privacy concerns has been emphasised .

o Intellectual Property: Copyright law and the protection of databases

(both in copyright and by the sui generis database right) are noted in this Report. It should be noted that practice in these areas of intellectual property law do differ in different EU member states and that the policies of SNSs here (particularly where an SNS requires that consent is needed to extract data) need also to be taken into consideration.

Overall, it can be seen that contract law and proper procedures are likely to play a crucial role in managing the risks posed by the legal context of the WeGov project. To a certain extent, the contractual model(s) chosen will be dependant on factors such as jurisdiction, the SNSs used and the use that the Toolset is being placed. There is no ‘one size fits all’ contractual model: careful consideration of specific legal and ethical issues and the contractual and procedural mechanisms for addressing these will need to be undertaken as the WeGov Scenarios and Toolset is further refined.