Dealing with ethics issues

Workspaces Software (SSNA)
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#1

Ethics issues in Euro projects are a real pain. Since SME Instrument application use more or less the same schema as large Euro projects, the overhead can get large quite quickly. We need to make a decision about what to do with question 4 in the main application; and section 5.1 of the Technical Annex.

I would probably suggest we claim that we do not collect any extra data, and just rework existing data on the Edgeryders platform. However, that is still technically personal data processing.

@Matthias, you are probably the most knowledgeable of us on the matter. Can you look into it?

#2

Doing the ethics self-assessment.

I have looked through section 4 of the main form re. the ethics issues and I guess we have to do more tickmarks there. Processing personal data cannot really be avoided in any IT project, so let’s just be honest about it and show them in the self-assessment that we care about it. (For example, we may fall under German data privacy laws since our server is in Cologne, and German law is even picky about Google Analytics, requiring the submission JavaScript to shorten visitor IP addresses by three digits. I’ll investigate in more detail tomorrow.)

1 Like
#3

Agreed

I think Edgeryders just got itself a new Ethics Director. :slight_smile:

#4

Ethics issues “resolved”

If you haven’t seen it yet, I found a way around the ethics issues and wrote an explanatory ethics self-assessment in the document about it. Even though it’s not required in this case, but it won’t hurt to explain just how we don’t have the “personal data” ethics issue. In short, data is only personal data if it can be used to identify individuals. Since we don’t require that, it’s the most elegant solution to just not collect personal data, not even people’s (real) e-mail addresses. I developed a scheme for that, and maybe it’s a little innovation as well …