As data science projects come under greater scrutiny from privacy advocates, the need for an easily accessible ethics checklist becomes apparent. DrivenData has launched Deon, a tool that provides actionable ethics reminders for data scientists.
The default checklist that comes with Deon has sections on data collection, data storage, analysis, modeling and deployment. But Deon is also easily customizable for projects with special needs. A point of emphasis in Deon is that checklist items must be extremely specific (e.g. “remove social security numbers from data”) rather than vague “Don’t be evil” platitudes.
Here is an excerpt from Natasha Mathur’s report on Deon for Packt:
According to the Deon team, “it’s not up to data scientists alone to decide what the ethical course of action is. This has always been a responsibility of organizations that are part of civil society. This checklist is designed to provoke conversations around issues where data scientists have particular responsibility and perspective”.
Deon comes with a default checklist, but you can also develop your own custom checklists by removing items and sections, or marking items as N/A depending on the needs of the project. There are also real-world examples linked with each item in the default checklist.
To be able to run Deon for your data science projects, you need to have Python 3 or greater.
