Four TDAI affiliates received honorable mention for their paper Business Data Ethics: Governance Transformations for the Era of Advanced Analytics and AI and were finalists in the Future of Policy Forum’s 2020 Privacy Papers for Policymakers. FPF reviewers and judges select papers by privacy scholars and authors for their analyses of emerging issues that are useful to policymakers in Congress, in federal agencies, at the state level and internationally.

For the paper, TDAI core faculty Dennis Hirsch; affiliates Aravind Chandrasekaran; Srinivasan Parthasarathy and Piers Norris Turner; and Timothy Bartley and Davon Norris conducted interviews and a survey with companies, lawyers and consultants considered leaders in data ethics policies and practices to document how and why companies pursue them.

From the executive summary: “Data ethics management, as we define it here, refers to a company’s governance of the threats that its own use of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) pose to individuals, the broader society and the company itself.... Much of the growing literature on this topic focuses on normative ideas as to what data ethics should be, or on proposals for the legislation or regulation required to achieve this normative state. By contrast, this Report...seeks to document the state of corporate data ethics management as it existed during the period when we conducted the interviews (2018-2019) and survey (2019-2020).... It should also provide ideas to companies and governmental organizations interested in pursuing data ethics with respect to their own use of advanced analytics and AI.”

The awards were presented at a virtual ceremony which included Acting Federal Trade Commission Chair Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who provided the keynote address. Several Congress members also attended, including Senator Edward Markey and Congresswoman Diana DeGette, who co-chair the Congressional Privacy Caucus.