Ethical Considerations

Data science and machine learning rely on data. Commercial applications using data must follow legal and ethical guidelines for gathering, processing, and retaining customer or public data. The topic I propose is a review of data governance practices, machine learning ethics, and how informatics professionals, machine learning engineers, systems designers, and policy activists can monitor data governance, privacy policies, and machine model behavior.

Laws such as the GDPR and CCPA have defined the rights of customers to control what companies know about them (European Union, 2016; California Legislature, 2018). These and similar laws ensure that people have the right to know what data exists about them and the right to be forgotten. The new EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), which came into force on August 1, 2024, is likely the first of many new laws that will attempt to regulate ML and AI (European Union, 2024). Like the GDPR and CCPA, it will impose requirements on data collection and governance, but it will also now impose requirements on machine learning model governance.