Ethical Implications of Predictive Risk Intelligence

open access articleThis paper presents a case study on the ethical issues that relate to the use of Smart Information Systems (SIS) in predictive risk intelligence. The case study is based on a company that is using SIS to provide predictive risk intelligence in supply chain management (SCM), insurance, finance and sustainability. The pa-per covers an assessment of how the company recognises ethical concerns related to SIS and the ways it deals with them. Data was collected through a document review and two in-depth semi-structured interviews. Results from the case study indicate that the main ethical concerns with the use of SIS in predictive risk intelli-gence include protection of the data being used in predicting risk, data privacy and consent from those whose data has been collected from data providers such as so-cial media sites. Also, there are issues relating to the transparency and accountabil-ity of processes used in predictive intelligence. The interviews highlighted the issue of bias in using the SIS for making predictions for specific target clients. The last ethical issue was related to trust and accuracy of the predictions of the SIS. In re-sponse to these issues, the company has put in place different mechanisms to ensure responsible innovation through what it calls Responsible Data Science. Under Re-sponsible Data Science, the identified ethical issues are addressed by following a code of ethics, engaging with stakeholders and ethics committees. This paper is important because it provides lessons for the responsible implementation of SIS in industry, particularly for start-ups. The paper acknowledges ethical issues with the use of SIS in predictive risk intelligence and suggests that ethics should be a central consideration for companies and individuals developing SIS to create meaningful positive change for society

Annotated Bibliography of Ethical Issues in Physics: Data Management

From acquiring and documenting data, to storing it and analyzing it, there are numerous procedures we employ to maintain the integrity of the data

Nurse managers' experience with ethical issues in six government hospitals in Malaysia: A cross-sectional study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nurse managers have the burden of experiencing frequent ethical issues related to both their managerial and nursing care duties, according to previous international studies. However, no such study was published in Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to explore nurse managers' experience with ethical issues in six government hospitals in Malaysia including learning about the way they dealt with the issues.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study was conducted in August-September, 2010 involving 417 (69.2%) of total 603 nurse managers in the six Malaysian government hospitals. Data were collected using three-part self-administered questionnaire. Part I was regarding participants' demographics. Part II was about the frequency and areas of management where ethical issues were experienced, and scoring of the importance of 11 pre-identified ethical issues. Part III asked how they dealt with ethical issues in general; ways to deal with the 11 pre-identified ethical issues, and perceived stress level. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations and Pearson's Chi-square.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 397 (95.2%) participants experienced ethical issues and 47.2% experienced them on weekly to daily basis. Experiencing ethical issues were not associated with areas of practice. Top area of management where ethical issues were encountered was "staff management", but "patient care" related ethical issues were rated as most important. Majority would "discuss with other nurses" in dealing generally with the issues. For pre-identified ethical issues regarding "patient care", "discuss with doctors" was preferred. Only 18.1% referred issues to "ethics committees" and 53.0% to the code of ethics.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Nurse managers, regardless of their areas of practice, frequently experienced ethical issues. For dealing with these, team-approach needs to be emphasized. Proper understanding of the code of ethics is needed to provide basis for reasoning.</p

Issues in Ethical Data Management - Extended Abstract

International audienceData science holds incredible promise of improving people's lives, accelerating scientific discovery and innovation, and bringing about positive societal change. Yet, if not used responsibly, this technology can generate economic inequality, destabilize global markets and worsen systemic bias. We consider issues such as bias and violation of data privacy in data analysis. We discuss desirable properties of data analysis such as fairness, transparency, neutrality, and diversity. Our goal is to draw the attention of the computer science community to the important emerging subject of responsible data management and analysis. We present our perspective on the issue, and motivate research directions. The data management research field has traditionally been driven primarily by enterprise data and focused on developing more and more sophisticated data models, and tackling issues such as performance and reliability. We believe that, in the future, the field will be increasingly driven by personal and social data, and will need to deal with challenging ethical issues. We will have to design concepts and principles to guide us in determining which behaviors, in data management, help us and which are harmful. To move computer science towards more responsible data analysis, the first issue is that of specifying desired properties. To make it operational in computers automatic decisions, the policy has to be made precise, to be formally stated in technical language. The computers role is also to help control the properties of data analysis by providing: tools to collect and analyze data responsibly, and tools to verify that data analysis was performed responsibly. To check the behavior of a program, one can either analyze its code (in the style of proving mathematical theorems) or test its effect (in the style of the experimental study of phenomena such as climate or the human heart). Both approaches have been intensely investigated, e.g., for guaranteeing security or performance, but much less for enforcing ethical properties such as fairness

The ethics of sociocultural risk research

In socio-cultural risk research, an epistemological tension often follows if real hazards in the world are juxtaposed against the essentially socially constructed nature of all risk. In this editorial, we consider how this paradox is manifest at a practical level in a number of ethical dilemmas for the risk researcher. (1) In terms of strategies for seeking informed consent, and for addressing the power inequalities involved in interpretative and analytical work, researchers can find themselves pushing at the boundaries of standard understandings of ethical practices and ways of engaging informants in their studies. (2) Impact on participants is another key area of concern, since the subject matter on which data are collected in risk research may be a source of uncertainty, anxiety or unwanted self knowledge. (3) Risk researchers also face the possibility of institutional repercussions of raising risk issues with people who usually normalize the risks, thereby stimulating distrust in the institutions or organizations with formal responsibilities for risk management. There are no simple formulae to guide the researcher in dealing with such ethical issues and paradoxes. It is important, though, to recognize their specificity in risk studies, including the ambiguous status of questions about vulnerability since judgements about 'who is vulnerable' and 'in what ways' are themselves influenced by the situational framings and understandings of participants and researchers

Ethnography, ethics and ownership of data

© The Author(s) 2019. Establishing trust and obtaining informed consent with participants is reliant upon on a process whereby unequally positioned agents constantly re-negotiate (mis)trust and consent during ethnographic encounters. All research has been increasingly subject to an intensification in ethical regulation, within a context whereby Eurocentric norms and ethical guidelines arguably diminish individual accountability under the guise of quasi-contractual relationships. This phenomenon has particular implications for ethnography and its management of ethics, given its intimate, longitudinal and receptive nature. Two expert ethnographers working with children and young people draw upon their work to reveal how issues of informed consent and data ownership can shift and be a source of tension and unequal power dynamics. The ethnographer requires autonomy while managing ethics soundly in situ to work within the messiness and unpredictability of participants’ everyday lives

Principles and practice of public health surveillance

Public health surveillance is the systematic, ongoing assessment of the health of a community including the timely collection, analysis, interpretation, dissemination and subsequent use of data. The book presents an organized approach to planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating public health surveillance systems. Chapters include: planning; data sources; system management and data quality control; analyzing surveillance data; special statistical issues; communication; evaluation; ethical issues; legal issues; use of computers; state and local issues; and surveillance in developing countries. The book is intended to serve as a desk reference for public health practitioners and as a text for students in public health.PB9 3-10 1129I: Introduction -- II: Planning a surveillance system -- III: Sources of routinely collected data for surveillance -- IV: Management of the surveillance system and quality control of data -- V: Analyzing and interpreting surveillance data -- VI: Special analytic issues -- VII: Communicating information for action -- VIII: Evaluating public health surveillance -- IX: Ethical issues -- X:Public health surveillance and the law -- XI: Computerizing public health surveillance systems -- XII: State and local issues in surveillance -- XIII: Important surveillance issues in developing countries -- Tables and figures.1992874

Legal, Risk and Ethical Aspects of Analytics in Higher Education

The collection, processing and retention of data for analytical purposes has become commonplace in modern business, and consequently the associated legal considerations and ethical implications have also grown in importance. Who really owns this information? Who is ultimately responsible for maintaining it? What are the privacy issues and obligations? What practices pose ethical challenges? This paper in the CETIS Analytics series covers legal, ethical and related management issues surrounding analytics in the context of teaching, learning and research and their underlying business processes. It is based on current UK law, set in the context of publicly funded Further and Higher Education and their mission. With a primary focus on personal data, it considers the rights and expectations of the data subjects (students, researchers, employees) and the responsibilities of institutions, above campus services, suppliers and funders

Does national ethical judgment matter for earnings management?

This study analyses the effect of ethical judgment at country-level on earnings management. While previous literature document the role of ethical issues at personal- and organizational-level on earnings management practices, usually theoretically and through qualitative ways, we investigate that association in a large sample at international level taken a sample of 81,408 firm-year observations regarding 10,306 firms from 39 countries. Based on data from an international questionnaire developed by the World Values Survey, we construct a comprehensive index of ethical judgment of each country. Our empirical findings suggest that the level of ethical judgment of the countries are negative associated with accruals-based earnings management, suggesting that the manipulation of accounting amounts is lower in countries where ethically suspect behaviours are less acceptable. Additionally, we also provide empirical evidences that this phenomenon is verified both in developed and emerging countries, and that ethical judgment at country-level seem to moderate the association between IFRS adoption and earnings management practices.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio