Introduction

This guidance document explores ethical considerations in the use of synthetic data for research, analysis, and statistics. The guidance can be used as a practical resource to help researchers identify and mitigate different ethical issues when using synthetic data.

The guidance is divided into several parts.

• An introduction to synthetic data, and why ethics matters in this space.
• An overview of some of the ethical considerations associated with synthetic data, and some potential mitigations for these issues.
• An ethics checklist which summarises the main points covered in this guidance.
• A list of helpful links to further resources, should you wish to read about particular aspects in more detail.