On the need for a global declaration of ethical principles for experimentation with personal data

In this paper, we argue that there is a growing need for a globally accepted set of ethical principles for experimentation that makes use of collections of personal multimodal data. Just as the Helsinki declaration was signed in 1964 to provide ethical principles that would guide all experimentation with human subjects, we argue that today the “digital personae” ought to be protected by a similar, globally endorsed declaration that informs legal regulations and policy making. The rationale for such a declaration lies in the increasing pervasiveness of the use of personal data in many aspects of our daily lives, as well as in the scattered nature of data research for which particular implementations of research ethics at the level of a single institution would not suffice. We argue that the asymmetry between ethical standards of public and of commercial entities, the borderless and boundless nature of online experimentation and the increasing ambiguity of the meaning of online “experiments”are compelling reasons to propose a global declaration of ethical principles for experimentation with personal data.