authoritarian depends on who has harnessed its power and for what purpose. She notes in order to make indicators less misleading and distorting some principles should be followed: democratize the production of indicators develop in parallel qualitative research to verify the validity of assumptions keep it the indicators simple test or adopt multiple framings admit the limits of the various measures Moving from indicators to mathematical models a group of 22 authors in propose five principles for making models serve society, moving from the premise that modelling is a social activity. The principles, which resonate with those above for indicators, are: take care to frankly assess the uncertainties and sensitivity of models; avoid obfuscatory complexity; make clear the normative values chosen by the models' developers; avoid spurious precision, and acknowledge ignorance The principle are addressed to modellers, to model users, and ultimately to society. The field of algorithms is the regime of quantification where the discussion about ethics is more advanced. An important work in this respect is Weapons of Math Destruction of Cathy O'Neil. While objectivity and efficiency are some positive properties associated with the use of algorithms, ethical issues are posed by these tools coming in the form of black boxes. Thus algorithms have the power to act upon data and make decisions, but they are to a large extent beyond query. The possibility of an observatory for the ethics of quantification has been discussed in a working paper of UCL Institute for Innovation and Public_Purpose. See also Webinar at Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, February 5, 2021: 'Ethics of quantification' Vedeo. Simposium on ethics of quantification Bergen (N0), December 2019 Research workshop on Ethics of quantification, Bergen (N0), December 2019 Sociology of quantification Society for the Social Studies of Quantification - SSSQ Special issue on Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: Ethics of Quantification: Big Data and Governing through Numbers, July 2020 Ethics in mathematics References Quantification (science) Ethics of science and technology