Lecture on April 24th, 2019
Ethics and the Internet of Things
Professor Irina Shklovski, IT University of Copenhagen
About the lecture
Connected systems and the Internet of Things can be creepy, collecting data and potentially sharing it in ways that violate individual or collective privacy. Proposals to address IoT ethics often focus on the systems once they have actually been built, but the VirtEU project has been focusing instead on the communities of practice who build IoT products, investigating how ethical practices unfold in this community. This presentation outlines some of the tensions we have found in practice between a desire to ‘do the right thing’ and the ability to put values into practice in a product-based start-up environment. I willl present the ethical framework that we have developed to address technology development contexts, and describe how we have put this framework into practice through participatory research within startup communities of practice in London and in Copenhagen. This talk focuses specifically on how the related ethical concepts of virtue, capability and care have been identified in the project and how these concepts, as distinct from ethical frameworks of consequentialism that often structure legal and policy responses to ethical challenges. Drawing from fieldwork among London and Copenhagen -based IoT startups, we identify ways to connect virtue, capability and care with working practices in the connected technology field and identify how these insights can inspire more nuanced discussions of ethical impact.
About the speaker
Irina Shklovski is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen working on big data, information privacy, social networks and relational practices. Her projects address online information disclosure, data leakage on mobile devices and the sense of powerlessness people experience in the face of massive personal data collection. She leads an EU-funded collaborative project VIRT-EU, examining how IoT developers enact ethics in practice in order to co-design interventions into the IoT development process to support ethical reflection on data and privacy in the EU context.
photo credit: ITU
Wednesday, 24. April 2019, 18:15-19:45
Main Campus, Room ESA H
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg
poster lecture Prof. Irina Shklovski [pdf]
programme "Taming the Machines" [pdf]
site plans:
lecture halls at Edmund-Siemers Allee 1: ESA1 [pdf]
University of Hamburg (Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 is number 12 in C3 of the map): UHH [pdf]