From PAPA to PAPAS and Beyond: Dealing with Ethics in Big Data, AI and other Emerging Technologies

The acronym PAPA, which stands for privacy, accuracy, property, and accessibility has long been part of the discussion of ethical issues in information systems. While all of the four constituent components remain relevant, technical progress and the integration of technology in organisations and society in the intervening almost 40 years call for a reconsideration of the acronym. In response to Richardson et al.’s proposal to add the term “society”, this paper suggests that an extension of the acronym in more than one dimension would be useful. This includes the dimension of stakeholder, which can be individuals, organisations or society. It could include the stage of systems use, including input, processing and output. The third dimension is the ethical issue, which still includes PAPA but can be supplemented with others, such as bias, power distribution and others. The paper therefore suggests that we not only need to extend PAPA to PAPAS but that we need to go beyond a list of ethical issues to capture the richness and complexity in which ethics and information systems interact.