Privacy protection and ethical governance - product (the solution) and process (concept-development) view

Numerous projects and applications use human centered data. While flexibility and availability of systems and data are extremely important, another crucial aspect is maintaining and ensuring awareness of privacy issues. Researchers may not have control over the disclosure of confidential data that has been collected, used, stored and disposed of during the implementation of the project and in the phase afterwards. Although there are several measures, regulations and mechanisms for the preservation of ethical requirements and accompanying commitments, studies and debates continually attest that additional articulation and implementation of an easy to use code of conduct for researchers is necessary, in order to provide guidance on data privacy in practical terms and minimize misconduct and misuse. Ethical implications of data collection, use and retention affect society both socially and financially. These impacts and categories, state of the art approaches and skills are and analyzed in the ETHICAL-project, leading to the development of ethical recommendations for assessment tools. Taking into account the findings from initial ETHICAL-project studies and its international benchmarking studies, the ETHICAL Consortium has made an attempt to meet this need by providing recommendations for a code of conduct and implementation measures for researchers. This particular presentation focuses on providing a practical tool for usage during proposal submission and contract conclusion as well as during the implementation of projects.