Ethics Label for Digital Systems to Promote Transparency and User Awareness

Background Modern digital systems pose risks to humans, society, and the environment. There is a flourishing of guidelines, recommendations, laws, and regulations, but also of standards that try to regulate and alleviate the lack of good practices for the governance, management, and quality of AI systems. However, having just a mark certifying that the system passed some checks is not enough and is fragile to the ethics washing problem. Objective The objective of this work is to go beyond compliance to standards toward an ethics label that enables users to understand the impact of systems on human, societal, and environmental values, both during system development and usage. Method To build the ethics label, we analyze guidelines, recommendations, laws and regulations, and quality standards. We validate the proposed ethics label through (i) a proof-of-concept application to the social assistive robotics domain, and (ii) interviews with experts from both academia and industry. Results We contribute an ethics label for modern digital systems that promote transparency and user awareness, and enable users to select systems that meet their subjective ethical preferences. Conclusion We discuss the problem of ethics washing and propose an ethics label as a means to foster transparency and raise user awareness.