The development of complex data supply chains, new technological developments and infrastructures for data sharing and access has been rapid. It has brought about new data markets, new data-related services, and new data ecosystems where various data-oriented organizations cooperate and compete.

National statistical institutes have been pioneers of data, producing a not only rich set of official statistics, but also, for decades, offering data related services like statistics on demand and micro-data for research purposes.

The new data ecosystems and new service roles as part of data value chains need capabilities that national statistical institutes already have. For example, data and metadate management, data quality management, data confidentiality and data sharing or skills in combining data from different sources are all needed in new data ecosystems. However, the offered new roles pose challenges when compared with the traditional understanding of statistical offices’ work. For example, the way data is used in new data ecosystems id quite different from producing statistics. The Data can be used as part of knowledge-based decision-making systems, as material to teach AI, as basis of complex impact assessment or policy evaluation systems.

The statistical community has recognized that the new data-era generates new ethical issues. Trust-enhancing measures like ethical commissions, ethics-related web segments and ethics communication strategies has been set up to overcome the everyday distrust situations.

The current ethical frameworks for statistics rely conceptually on the idea of an organization – or researcher – collecting data directly from the units they aim to study. In the era of data ecosystems and frequent sharing of data, the assumption of direct data collection is no longer valid. Statistical institutes are not only the primary users of data they collect, secondary users of administrative and privately held data and providing data for various tertiary uses.

The session analyses the new roles of statistical offices from the ethics point of view. What kind of new roles do the new data ecosystems offer, which of the new roles are compatible with the current ethical frameworks for statistics, and reflects whether statical ethical codes should be amended, or re-interpreted.