A think a governing body solves the wrong problem. Most of the ethical issues that have arisen around data science in particular are actually competency issues. It's not that someone deliberately set out to target already-vulnerable populations. It's that they designed systems without building in checks for unintended consequences. A governing body accomplishes what any legal framework accomplishes: it provides instruction and incentives to limit liability. A legal framework is different than an ethical framework. What we need is an ethical framework.

The original Hippocratic Oath did a fairly good job of this by stipulating ways that a doctor could prove his competence. Doctors who adhered to the oath weren't better doctors because they had some kind of internal moral compass or external adjudicating body. They were better doctors because only the doctors who had competency to spare were willing to make the sacrifices that adherence to the oath required.

https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-...

Ethical problems get solved (as much as that type of problem can ever really be "solved") by individual practitioners refusing to work with other individual practitioners who refuse to adhere to some basic best practices. That creates a network of competent and trustworthy individuals, who are still totally fallible, but who put their own practice up toe constant public scrutiny.

Ethical problems are problems of systemic risk. Systemic risk doesn't get solved through organizations.