Inclusive Ethical Design for Recommender Systems
This addresses the need for more inclusive ethical guidelines in recommender systems to protect adolescents, but it is incremental as it builds on existing responsible design efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring recommender systems are ethically designed, particularly for vulnerable adolescent users, by proposing core principles and evaluating current approaches for inclusivity.
Recommender systems are becoming increasingly central as mediators of information with the potential to profoundly influence societal opinion. While approaches are being developed to ensure these systems are designed in a responsible way, adolescents in particular, represent a potentially vulnerable user group requiring explicit consideration. This is especially important given the nature of their access and use of recommender systems but also their role as providers of content. This paper proposes core principles for the ethical design of recommender systems and evaluates whether current approaches to ensuring adherence to these principles are sufficiently inclusive of the particular needs and potential vulnerabilities of adolescent users.