Evaluation of Public Services Through the Lens of Digital Ethics

Abstract

The rapidly growing popularity of digital services requires robust frameworks to identify and address associated ethical concerns. This paper presents a structured framework for assessing ethical concerns of digital services, offering a scalable and adaptable tool to assess concerns, including data misuse, cybersecurity, transparency, inequality, and sustainability. The framework employs a customized Delphi method to gather diverse expert insights, translating them into quantifiable metrics through a mathematical model. These metrics inform structured surveys, generating actionable outputs, including visual summaries, static recommendations, and AI-driven insights. To illustrate the framework’s application, we detail its implementation in the context of electronic voting (e-voting). By addressing key ethical challenges, mainly privacy, transparency, and inclusivity, this use case demonstrates the framework’s utility in analyzing complex digital services. The study highlights the importance of balancing technological innovation with ethical accountability, providing a practical approach to ensuring transparency and trust in public digital services.