Seeing Without Being Seen: A Review of Ethical and Human-Centric ISAC in 6G

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), enabling communication infrastructure to simultaneously transmit data and sense the surrounding physical environment, is emerging as a cornerstone technology for sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks. While these capabilities unlock new applications in healthcare, safety, and ambient intelligence, they also introduce novel ethical and societal challenges related to privacy, transparency, user autonomy, and trust, which are values fundamental to the social acceptance of the technology. Firstly, an overview of academic, institutional, and industrial contributions on human-centric 6G is provided, with a focus on how ethical values are addressed in ISAC-related contexts. Secondly, this paper reviews the distinctive characteristics of ISAC through representative human-centric use cases involving non-interactive and often invisible sensing of people, highlighting the ethical and societal implications emerging from such scenarios. By analyzing current standardization efforts and the scientific literature, this paper identifies emerging trends in Key Values (KVs) relevant to ISAC, as well as open research gaps that must be addressed to support trustworthy and value-oriented ISAC design in future 6G networks.