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Information Ethics

Individual privacy and the conduct of web users

From October the 12th to the 14th London will host the RSA conference, which gathers together information security experts from across the world to discuss the most pertinent emerging issues in information security.

The safeguarding of users’ privacy is one of the most important and frequently discussed issues in the field of information security, and is therefore a major topic of the RSA conference. In particular, BT's chief technology officer, Mr Schneier expressed his concern about how web companies deal with users’ privacy; he stressed the need for regulations and laws to create or encourage improved management of this issue (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11524041).

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Spying on people for fun and profit

A new company, Internet Eyes, promises to crowdsource monitoring of surveillance cameras by using online users to watch footage and report suspicious activity. They would get rewarded 'up to £1,000' if they press the alarm button to report something useful. Not unexpectedly the anti-CCTV groups really dislike the idea. The Information Commissioner is somewhat sceptical but allowed a beta test to go ahead, as long as users had to pay for using it – this would allow their details to be checked and would reduce risks for misuse. However, at least one subscribe "thought it was his civic duty to sign up". Civic duty or profit-making voyerism?

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I’m a taxpayer, I want my data!

A ruling by the Information Commissioner has ordered scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast to hand over copies of 40 years of research data on tree rings after a long battle with a climate sceptic. (PDF of the ruling) This is an important precedent for scientists, who have to comply with the strictest interpretation of the
Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. According to the Times: "Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and
Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on
the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to
be made publicly available." More and more, there are demands for public releases of research data.

Were the scientists right in trying to withhold data, or is the public interest stronger? Is there a moral obligation to publish not just the results of publicly funded research, but the underlying data?

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Is your fingerprint part of you?

In a report expressing concern about the increasing use of
biometric information to protect security and privacy, the Irish Council for
Bioethics (ICB) claimed earlier this month that “an individual’s biometric
information is an intrinsic element of that person”. Such claims are quite
commonly made in relation to genetic information, though the ICB’s extension of
the concept to other forms of biological information, such as that acquired from
fingerprinting, voice recognition software, and gait analysis, may be novel.

The claim that biometric information is an ‘intrinsic element of
the person’ seems designed to invoke powerful intuitions about our ownership of
our own body parts: we own our biological information just like we own our
kidneys. Indeed, the ICB go on to say that “the right to bodily integrity…. should
apply not only to an individual’s body, but also to any information derived
from the body, including his/her biometric information”. But both the
metaphysical claim that biometric information is an intrinsic element of the
person,and the moral claim that it is covered by rights to bodily integrity
are highly problematic.

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Informed consent in the Googlesphere

Here's an interesting snippet

But there's also the fact that Google is stuffed full of people who just love to experiment on its users. For instance, Google Mail uses a very slightly different blue for links than the main search page. Its engineers wondered: would that change the ratio of clickthroughs? Is there an "ideal" blue that encourages clicks? To find out, incoming users were randomly assigned between 40 different shades of links – from blue-with-green-ish to blue-with-blue-ish. It turned out blue-ness encouraged clicks more than green-ness. Who would have guessed? And who would have cared? Google, of course, which wants to get people clicking around the net.

I take this sort of experimentation as utterly, boringly unproblematic

But on one view – this is surreptitious experimentation without consent including randomisation.

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Sometimes justice wears a mask: blogging, anonymity and the open society

After the Times exposed the identity of the police blogger "Night Jack" he has been disciplined by the police force. The blog (now deleted) had won the Orwell Price for political writing and often expressed critical views related to the police and the justice system. In a court ruling Mr Justice Eady claimed that blogging was "essentially a public rather than a private activity" and that it was in the public interest to know who originated opinions and arguments. Do we have a right to anonymity on the net? And is it truly in the public interest to know who every blogger is?

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Precrime in Camden: using DNA profiles for crime prevention

The UK police has an estimated 5.3 million DNA profiles in its databases, of which about 850,000 are of people who were never convicted of any crime (including 24,000 samples of youngsters who have never been convicted, cautioned or charged with any offence). Although the European Court ruled that a policy of retaining profiles of innocent people is illegal, the Home Office seems keen to retain them anyway, at least for serious crimes. Now it is claimed by a police officer that police in Camden deliberately target young people who have not been arrested yet in order to obtain DNA samples. According to him it is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy to discourage future crime. But does pre-emptive acquisition of DNA profiles make sense as crime prevention?

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Intuitive pirates: why do we accept file sharing so much?

Piracy is in the headlines, whether in Somalian waters or Swedish cyberspace. A Stockholm court this friday found four men guilty of promoting copyright infringement by running the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay and sentenced them to one year in prison as well as a 30 million kronor fine (about $3.5 million). The case will no doubt go to a higher court and the circus (as well as the piracy) will continue. Legally, at least in the sense of the spirit of the laws banning copyright infringement, the case is pretty clear. But morally, what is wrong with file sharing? And why don't people care?

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Open source censorship

The struggle against child porn goes on. An Australian judge has ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the whole population, although the project has run into serious opposition. Meanwhile Wikipedia ended up 'censored' in the UK due to a page with the controversial cover of an album.

The most interesting aspect of the Wikipedia debacle is that the decision that led to the censorship was not made by any government authority but an industry-sponsored group, the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF maintains a blacklist certain ISPs subscribe to, and users trying to reach a site on it will be sent a blank page. Is this censorship, and is this bad?

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