Ethics of Food Recommender Applications

The recent unprecedented popularity of food recommender applications has raised several issues related to the ethical, societal and legal implications of relying on these applications. In this paper, in order to assess the relevant ethical issues, we rely on the emerging principles across the AI & Ethics community and define them tailored context specifically. Considering the popular Food Recommender Systems (henceforth F-RS) in the European market cannot be regarded as personalised F-RS, we show how merely this lack of feature shifts the relevance of the focal ethical concerns. We identify the major challenges and propose a scheme for how explicit ethical agendas should be explained. We also argue how a multi-stakeholder approach is indispensable to ensure producing long-term benefits for all stakeholders. After proposing eight ethical desiderata points for F-RS, we present a case-study and assess it based on our proposed desiderata points.