This Workshop, organized within EU H2020 ‘PANELFIT’ project, will address the issue of personal data processing in the research field under both the legal and the ethical perspective. Large amounts of personal data are processed during research projects and several researches (mostly ICT researchers) produce algorithms that could be employed in several fields with significant effects on data subjects.
The GDPR provides specific rules and safeguards about personal data processing for research purposes, but there is still room for interpretation and uncertainty, in particular considering national GDPR implementations.
This panel will address the most significant issues in this field:
- transparency requirements, i.e. how to adequately inform data subjects and how to preserve their decisional freedom, also taking into account secondary data subjects (e.g. relatives in case of genetic data processing) whose data could be processed;
- legal bases for processing personal data (and in particular sensitive data) for research purposes and necessary safeguards to adopt, in particular how consent should be required in this field and whether and how other legal bases should be preferred (public interest for personal data processing; research purposes for the processing of special categories of data);
- limits and safeguards for automated decision-making algorithms used/produced during research projects, in particular by-design solutions (legibility of algorithms according to the duty to give meaningful information about logics, significance and consequences).
- Data Protection Impact Assessment in the research field, taking also into account ethical standards (Ethical Impact Assessment).
- code of conducts of researchers processing personal data, taking into account existing national implementations (e.g. Italian and Irish).
- protection of individual vulnerabilities during research, in particular considering disadvantaged group and potential situations of unfair imbalances between researchers and data subjects.
The workshop will be also an opportunity to discuss the first draft of PANELFIT Ethical and Legal Guidelines for Data Protection in ICT Research.
Each intervention will be then submitted in a special issue of a peer-reviewed JCR legal journal.
For more information on PANELFIT, see here. For registration, contact Gianclaudio Malgieri (gianclaudio.malgieri@vub.be).