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Data Ethics in Space
During the international CPDP workshop, I polled the audience in asking whether they agreed with the proposition that a wholly new ethical framework should be developed to address space-based data risks. No one agreed that space data merited a new ethical framework. Rather, the attendees questioned the practical value of a “new model,” and instead encouraged using existing frameworks to ensure human dignity, oversight, and fairness in the application of this tool.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, one example of a pre-existing ethics framework used in data science is the Belmont Report. Following the U.S. Public Health biomedical scandal in 1972, which involved unethical practices studying African American patients dying from syphilis, Congress formed the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The commission met in Belmont, California, and promulgated the following three ethical principles for health science studies: (1) respect for persons, (2) justice, and (3) beneficence, in addition to informed consent. Next, in 1993, a group of information technology leaders convened a meeting in Menlo Park, California to produce the Menlo Report. This report built upon the foundation of the Belmont Report’s three principles but added several additional principles such as (1) respect for the law, (2) mitigating harms, (3) considering stakeholder perspectives, and (4) accountability.
Before the Users’ Advisory Group subcommittee on climate and societal benefits presents at the next national council to advocate for a “new” set of principles for data ethics, it could be more helpful to instead look at the Belmont and Menlo models to see what is lacking. How could these models be applied in the space domain? With the upcoming 74th International Astronautical Conference in Milan, Italy, U.S. space leaders could convene a side workshop at the conference to advance a discussion on ethical data science principles with a greater cross section of the international space community. In turn, this could shine a light on how to safeguard refugees from persecution under this AI-augmented capability.
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