Designing an ethical framework for evaluating Human Monitoring Algorithms

Abstract

In the age of golden data, there are many ways of gathering data from human users. The most valuable data currently is psychographic data about an individual, as companies use this information to provide the user with personal recommendations or advertisements, among others. This data is usually gathered through the use of small algorithms that monitor physical or online behaviour of human individuals. However, these small algorithms are never the ones that are blamed or investigated. The algorithms in question are defined in this work as Human Monitoring Algorithms as that accurately describes the behaviour of the algorithm. Since the data that is gathered is often sensitive, there is a need for the ethical evaluation of these small algorithms that function in the background. This work provides an ethical framework for the evaluation of these Human Monitoring Algorithms.