Researching Cybercrime in the European Union: Asking the Right Ethics Questions

European Union (EU) research is based on the commitment to embed ethics from the first conceptual stage of the proposal through the implementation of the project. Given this background, and while the concern for ethics in crime research has been widely covered by the European Commission, few contributions have yet shifted their interest on this issue with respect to the growing research on cybercrime. Hence, the purpose of the study is threefold: first, to identify the main European Commission research ethics guidelines and their applicability to cybercrime research; second, to conceptually introduce internet research ethics as a potential ethical framework that can serve as a complement to existing European reference documents; and third, to provide support on identifying some of its main challenges through practical key questions applied to cybercrime research.