Digital Transparency in Public Information

Infoethics

Abstract

Several public digital media, transparency portals, open data and repositories have contributed to citizens' access to information. These changes also have a profound influence on the norms, principles and values ​​that guide citizens' social lives. But this large volume of data does not imply transparency, there are different organizational, technical, political, social and ethical barriers that limit access to information. The objective of the work was to debate the main ethical barriers to transparency and free access to information on public activities. Therefore, we proceed to a qualitative research, of the descriptive type, which started from the studies of access to public information, ethics and Government Open Data, to establish a link between the concepts. For data collection and analysis, bibliographic research was used. Data collection in this field was through the Capes portal, with a time frame of the last 10 years. Thus, it is observed that the ethical barriers identified in the research are the sharing of information from combined data sets, which cause privacy violations; data bias and discriminatory decisions by using data-based algorithms; privacy issues from discoveries of human habits through mass surveillance; data leakage; difficulties in adapting views to different audiences; uncertain ownership of data; misinformation; and somewhat more “sanitized” disseminated data. Which allows us to conclude that the research had as a contribution, the systematization of the process of access to information and the different possible barriers identified, which interfere in the ethical aspect for the transparency of public information. It is suggested for future research, empirical studies on intercultural ethical barriers in federal or state agencies, transparency and access to information, through the different channels offered by governments, government repositories portals or open data.