D3.9 POLICYCLOUD'S SOCIETAL AND ETHICAL REQUIREMENTS & GUIDELINES – M34

This report provides the third and definitive version of all the societal and ethical requirements and guidelines as described in Task 3.5. More specifically, this deliverable analyses the ethical, legal, regulatory, and societal issues related to PolicyCLOUD. With regards to ethical and societal issues, from a general standpoint the main findings relate to the importance of ensuring the accuracy of the dataset used for performing the analytics and the policymaking to achieve an adequate degree of reliability on the policies developed based on the same analytics. Also, the respect of the principle of transparency appears relevant to ensure the engagement of the end-users and to obtain their trust in the policies developed through PolicyCLOUD. Moreover, the key issue is to ensure an adequate level of human engagement in the data processing and policymaking processes, to avoid the relevant ethical and societal risks related to a complete automatization of decisional processes, which may be jeopardised by biases (whether in the initial dataset or in the algorithm), leading for example to discrimination phenomena. The general legal and regulatory issues related to the Project concern contractual protection of data sources, legal protection of databases, copyright, and personal data protection and privacy. Of this list, personal data protection is the most important legal and regulatory issue related to the Project since the development of PolicyCLOUD implies the collection and processing of a relevant amount of personal identifiable information. Therefore, compliance with the requirements defined by the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons regarding the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation – “GDPR”) and other applicable personal data protection regulations is paramount for the correct and sustainable implementation of PolicyCLOUD. Also, by analysing in detail the ethical, legal, regulatory, and societal issues related to the components of the Project, the risks are focused on the selection of the datasets to be used, from the perspective of both their accuracy and the legitimacy to collect and process the data for the purposes of the Project. These issues need to be addressed whether the data used constitute personal data; however, when personal data are involved, appropriate safeguards shall be implemented, especially to comply to applicable data protection laws. Furthermore, this deliverable examines the specific issues related to each of the use cases (“UCs”). Finally, a review is provided on how the ethical, legal, regulatory, and societal requirements have been embedded in the solutions developed throughout the Project.