Paper vs. practice: How legal and ethical frameworks influence public sector data professionals in the Netherlands

I.C. Fest, M.A. Wieringa, B. Wagner*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Recent years have seen a massive growth in ethical and legal frameworks to govern data science practices. Yet one of the core questions associated with ethical and legal frameworks is the extent to which they are implemented in practice. A particularly interesting case in this context comes to public officials, for whom higher standards typically exist. We are thus trying to understand how ethical and legal frameworks influence the everyday practices on data and algorithms of public sector data professionals. The following paper looks at two cases: public sector data professionals (1) at municipalities in the Netherlands and (2) at the Netherlands Police. We compare these two cases based on an analytical research framework we develop in this article to help understanding of everyday professional practices. We conclude that there is a wide gap between legal and ethical governance rules and the everyday practices.
Original languageEnglish
Article number100604
Pages (from-to)1-13
Number of pages13
JournalPatterns
Volume3
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Oct 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The Netherlands Police portion of this work was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO: 406.DI.19.011). All authors have contributed equally to this work. I.F conducted field research with the Netherlands Police and M.W. conducted field research with municipalities in the Netherlands. B.W. developed the analytical framework. All three authors wrote and edited all chapters in this paper. Lead contact is Ben Wagner ([email protected]). Ben Wagner is a member of the Patterns Journal Advisory Board. We support inclusive, diverse, and equitable conduct of research.

Funding Information:
The Netherlands Police portion of this work was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO: 406.DI.19.011 ).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s)

Keywords

  • DSML2: Proof-of-concept: Data science output has been formulated, implemented, and tested for one domain/problem

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