Bücher der Reihe Anthem Ethics of Personal Data

Can ethics be hacked? Can new and unexpected meaning be found in or behind established traditions of moral discourse? Does not the digital transformation challenge us to develop a digital ethics that is just as disruptive and transformative as the technologies it proposes to regulate? Would ethical hacking be the same as hacking ethics? This book attempts to answer these questions. The occasion for this attempt is the digital transformation, the advent of a global network society, the big data revolution, datafication, and whatever other terms come to mind to describe our present historical moment. In the face of this changing reality, ethics has attempted to become digital ethics. No area of personal or social life is not conditioned by the digital and everything that it stands for and everything it brings with it. Marx would probably have been overjoyed to learn that very soon there will be no more workers since robots will do the work, that everyone will own the means of production, that is, their own creativity and skills, and that a sharing economy will largely replace capitalism. But would he be happy about the prospects of a posthuman or even transhuman world in which not only intelligence but also agency and identity are distributed among heterogeneous networks of humans and nonhumans? Would he be happy at the prospect of a data-driven society in which decisions are made based on evidence and not intuition, gut feelings, cognitive bias, prejudice, experience, and inherited assumptions? Indeed, not only Marx but practically no theory or world view that has arisen within the modern period, including ethics, finds itself able to cope with the new digital world order. Instead, we are experiencing in all areas the defensive reaction of Western industrial society to the disruptive influences of digital technologies. The world is changing. The digital transformation disrupts traditional forms of order, whether it be the order of knowledge, the order of cooperative action in social organizations, or the self-understanding of human existence.The world of Western modernity is disappearing and a new world, let us call it a global network society, is emerging in its stead. For established institutions and habits of thought, this is a threatening and highly uncertain situation. Facing up to this situation does indeed have an ethical dimension; it does call for ethics. But an adequate moral response to this situation is not and cannot be merely applying traditional values and norms to digital technologies. Nonetheless, the current discourse of digital ethics consists almost entirely of attempts to apply traditional normative ethics to the development and deployment of new technologies. The thesis of this book is that no amounts of rights and duties, of moral norms and ethical imperatives, no list of ethical guidelines or principles of good AI or ethical big data are going to have the slightest effect if they do not leave the presuppositions, convictions, and traditions of Western industrial society behind and embark upon exploring a new world with new values and new forms of responsibility and accountability. This is the challenge of hacking digital ethics. The hack, from this point of view, consists of breaking into the codes of traditional moral discourse and redesigning things so that something like digital ethics can appear unconcealed from the outworn and concealing veil of modernity.Perhaps, despite all the publicity and attention, the hasty founding of institutes, centers, and departments for digital ethics, the activism of non-profit organizations, and the flood of guidelines, declarations, and programs supporting ethical design, development, and deployment of technology there currently is no such thing as digital ethics. There is only modern Western ethics, that is, ethics that arose within modern Western society, that is, within a no longer viable social order and a passing historical moment. It could be that a uniquely digital ethics is waiting for the hack to come into view for the first time. One could even go so far as to claim that ethics today is fundamentally dependent upon the hack and not the other way around. It is not hacking that needs ethics; it is ethics that needs hacking. Could such an endeavor be judged by the standards it leaves behind? Can the global network society be judged by the standards of Western industrial society? What new norms take the place of the old ones? And what does ethics become, when it no longer answers to the questions of the world in which it was formed, which defined what it was, and which, whether we like it or not, no longer exists? This book is an attempt to answer these questions and open up the possibility of a digital ethics capable of addressing the problems of the global network society.

The literature that references personal data collection risks is growing amidst international scandals, notably the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook interference in the Brexit referendum and 2016 US Presidential election as well as other elections in countries throughout our world. Questions of fundamental importance to the study and practice of international relations are being asked as concerns are expressed, including the most pressing that speak to accountability, the ethics of use in local areas, and the impact on the vulnerable populations that information and communications technologies (ICTs) promise to serve. Yet, the editors observe that in key texts written to teach international relations, less mention is made of personal data collection risks in countries around the globe. This book addresses this significant omission in the literature.

This volume's relevance may be explained, first and foremost, during a time of unprecedented loss of life around the world each day. The data, which is oftentimes incomplete and misleading, nonetheless reveals the state as deficient as well as negligent in its response to social healthcare needs. This volume attests to the fact that pressing global public health concerns are ever present as subjects of societal discourse and debate in developed and developing states. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic makes the omission of the ethics of personal data collection analysis in the international relations literature even more salient given the rise of contact tracing and increased uses of mobile phone Apps to track citizens by states and firms across the globe, as this volume's chapters analyzing the responses to COVID-19 in Iran and Taiwan explain. For this reason, dialogue connecting research and practice is necessary to identify ways to address these emerging challenges at the conceptual, economic, legal, political, and social levels. The perspectives of researchers and the experience of practitioners must come together to bring the discussion forward. In response to this plea, a community of research-practitioners remains in dialogue after two Bosch Workshops at New York University to define the contents of case studies in this volume. The responsibility of this research-practitioner community is to grapple with specific issues that define the state of the discipline in personal data collection ethics. Case studies, including prominent uses of crowd-mapping platforms and mobile telephony Apps, document legal and human rights concerns in remote areas. Field research speaks to cases ranging from an analysis of Iran's response to the COVID-19 pandemic to the exploitation of personal data collection to perpetuate modern slavery through re-education camps in the People's Republic of China to crowd-mapping stories of physical abuses in public spaces by Safecity in India.The emphasis on the ethics of personal data collection in this edited volume through various case studies is to bring race and gender to the forefront once again as lenses to understand international relations. The myth of the founding of international relations in 1919, analyzed by Acharya and Buzan (2019) a century later, is one that obfuscates the influence of race relations as well as gender in the early development of the discipline during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These case studies broaden the ways we understand international relations in the West and, as importantly, in the non-Western space given the countries that are the subjects of analysis: China, Iran, Taiwan, and India, as well as the European Union and the United States. As the contributors focus on the relevance of race and gender across cases, this volume underlines our concerns about the future of democracy in the face of the rising tide of authoritarianism around the world. The plight of the world's largest and most plural democracy, India, under the Modi government, the increasingly aggressive nature of China under President Xi Jinping as well as the challenge of Trumpism in the United States make these concerns, which place illiberalism at the center of developments, pressing as well as timely.