Empowering users in the digital world through ethics and privacy profiling

The thriving scope of machine ethics related problems and emerging themes about autonomous systems such as inequality, fair human-machine interaction, biasing, deception, opacity and explainability, security, unintended consequences, rights, are increasingly the focus of attention in the scientific community. The ever-increasing consideration of the interaction between human beings and computer systems made explicit by individual users as well as by political and government institutions (e.g. GDPR), is bringing to the fore the need to design ethical-enabled systems that take into account the uniqueness and peculiarities of their users and their right to be protected against the loss of privacy, autonomy, rights, individuality, morality. This dissertation is about ethics application in the digital world and in autonomous intelligent systems, with a particular focus on human ethics analysis and synthesis to produce an ethical model to be used in automated systems. It investigates privacy as ethical dimension, surveys the literature on privacy profiling (by the meaning of gathering, analyzing, and classifying data to construct profiles of people), analyzes problems related to machine ethics and intelligent systems, with reference to critical issues on profiling, and illustrates a practical example on web security.