  The development and the spread of increasingly autonomous digital
technologies in our society pose new ethical challenges beyond data protection
and privacy violation. Users are unprotected in their interactions with digital
technologies and at the same time autonomous systems are free to occupy the
space of decisions that is prerogative of each human being. In this context the
multidisciplinary project Exosoul aims at developing a personalized software
exoskeleton which mediates actions in the digital world according to the moral
preferences of the user. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a
user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature,
but aiming at reflecting and predicting general moral preferences. Our approach
is hybrid, first based on the identification of profiles in a top-down manner,
and then on the refinement of profiles by a personalized data-driven approach.
In this work we report our initial experiment on building such top-down
profiles. We consider the correlations between ethics positions (idealism and
relativism) personality traits (honesty/humility, conscientiousness,
Machiavellianism and narcissism) and worldview (normativism), and then we use a
clustering approach to create ethical profiles predictive of user's digital
behaviors concerning privacy violation, copy-right infringements, caution and
protection. Data were collected by administering a questionnaire to 317 young
individuals. In the paper we discuss two clustering solutions, one data-driven
and one model-driven, in terms of validity and predictive power of digital
behavior.
