for centuries: protecting
citizens does not have the same meaning across countries and cultures. The USA navigates between
commitment to performance (through more personal data collected) and commitment to freedom (through less
personal data collected), which may explain the existing disparities between individual American states.
In this context of strong cultural differences, numerous guidelines and frameworks have been published in the
past few years by countries and by international organisations. The majority have a technological focus (data,
AI, platforms) and include a section that covers the related ethical issues.
The maturity of the ethics approach, at international and state level, largely depends on the type of technology.
• Ethics in blockchain and in cloud services have started to be analysed in academic research.
• Technologies like devices, robots and AI seem to attract a greater degree of consideration, being subject
to recommendations, guidelines, and self-regulation. It is important to note here that national and
international frameworks presented below promote ethics in the design, development and/or use of
digital technologies, but most of them do not provide for any monitoring or enforcement mechanism.
• Only laws, regulations and court decisions would enable oversight and enforcement of public and
private stakeholders, whether it be a general rule (e.g. civil code), a digital specific rule (e.g. GDPR), or
a sector-specific law or regulation (e.g. health). Thus, at a third level, platforms and their related topics
of data privacy and online harms have started to reach regulatory or legal levels.
We are still at a nascent stage of ethical considerations in digital technology overall; and geographies are not at
the same level of consideration and implementation on the subject. The sections below offer a non-exhaustive
review of tools implemented by states and international organisations, to promote ethics in digital technologies.
Ethical issues identified for each technology are not necessarily unique to this technology. Therefore, overlaps
appear. For instance, privacy and data ownership are a concern for cloud services, robots, IoT, AI as well as
platforms. It is also important to note that – because it uses algorithms and data while being used as a
background technology to make other technologies work or make them more efficient (e.g. in platforms, apps,
IoT) – AI is the central subject of many recommendations, and guidelines described below.
a. Cloud services and blockchain: Academic research on ethics
Cloud services and Software as a Service (SaaS) enable a flexible usage of a service based on the following
elements: computing, network, and storage. This technology has been studied lately from an ethical perspective,