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

Abstract

Researchers have long referred to privacy, accuracy, property, and accessibility (PAPA) framework in discussing ethical issues in information systems. While all four constituent components remain relevant, technical progress and technological integration in organizations and society in the intervening almost 40 years call for researchers to consider the acronym. In response to Richardson, Petter, and Carter's (2021) proposal to add the term "society", I suggest that extending the acronym in more than one dimension would be useful. For example, one could extend the acronym to include stakeholders (e.g., individuals, organizations or society) and system-use stage (e.g., 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. Therefore, I suggest 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.