Category Archives: Transparency

a network norm

AI Now or AI as it Could Be

The 2018 Symposium organized by the AI Now Institute (https://symposium.ainowinstitute.org/) under the title of “Ethics, Organizing, and Accountability” is interesting for a number of reasons. The AI Now Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence which was founded in 2017 by Kate Crawford (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Crawford and Meredith Whittaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker) and is housed at the Ney York University.

The name is significant. AI “now” is indeed about AI as it is now, that is, not as it could and should be. Emphasizing the “now” has a critical edge. The focus is on what AI is actually doing, or more accurately, not doing right in the various areas of concern to the Institute, namely law enforcement, security, and social services. The AI Now Institute’s explicit concern with the “social implications” of AI translates into a rather one-sided civil rights perspective. What the institute explores are primarily the dangers of AI with regard to civil rights issues. This is well and good. It is necessary and of great use for preventing misuse or even abuse of the technology. But is it enough to claim that simply dropping AI as it is now into a social, economic, and political reality riddled with discrimination and inequality will not necessarily enhance civil rights and that the technology should therefore either not be used at all or if it is used, then under strict regulative control? Should one not be willing and able to consider the potential of AI to address civil rights issues and correct past failings, and perhaps even to start constructively dealing with the long-standing injustices the Institute is primarily concerned with? Finally, quite apart from the fact that the social implications of AI go way beyond civil rights issues, should not the positive results of AI in the areas of law enforcement, crime prevention, security, and social services also be thrown onto the scale before deciding to stop deployment of AI solutions? One cannot escape the impression that the general tenor of the participants at the symposium is the throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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Network Publicy Governance and Cyber Security

Hardly a day goes by that the media do not confront us with headlines on the latest breaches, hacks, and attacks, whether political, criminal, or both and which effect all areas of society. Many of these attacks are not even new, but sometimes years old and have only recently been discovered and reported. It is therefore reasonable to assume that there are many security breaches that we don’t know about and perhaps, for various reasons, never will. At least with regard to what we do know, the cost of cybercrime and cyber attacks has been estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, quite apart from the other damaging effects, for example, loss of trust in the effectiveness of our law enforcement and security institutions.  It has become apparent that traditional law enforcement and security measures do not work when it comes to preventing or combatting cyber-warfare, cyber-crime, and cyber-terrorism. For example, it is often difficult to find the scene of the crime, the weapons or tools used in the crime, to assess the damage done, or determine who is responsible. And even if it is possible to find out who did it, this information is mostly useless. One is left with the impression that despite enormous efforts by law enforcement and security institutions, cybercriminals and hackers move through our networks with impunity.

Of course, there are many reasons for this, including our own negligence. We ourselves, whether it be infrastructure and software providers or users are often a major part of the problem. The state of simple and normal “digital hygiene,” such as updates, anti-virus software, strong passwords, and so on is so deplorable that it makes you WANNACRY.

What can we do? Whereas new technologies of trust by design and new networked organizational models are slowly becoming focuses of interest for cyber security solutions, legal and ethical proposals seem not to have moved beyond positions developed in the bygone industrial era. The digital transformation seems not to have changed much in our conceptions of what security means and how freedom, autonomy, and human dignity are to be preserved in the information age. Although ethics and discussions of values and norms may appear of only incidental significance when standing on the front in the struggle against cyber-crime, cyber-warfare, and cyber-terrorism, they play a very important role in the foundational regulative frameworks that condition law enforcement and security strategies. For this reason, it is perhaps time to take a critical look at ethics with regard to cyber security.

If values and norms do not come from God or his representatives on Earth – including pure reason –, and if they are not hardwired into our DNA, then it is at least plausible that they emerge from the interactions of social actors. What has become apparent in the digital era is that technologies, artifacts, and non-humans must also be considered to be social actors. Non-humans have become our partners in constructing social order. This means that the “affordances” of information and communication technologies (ICTs), contribute to our norms and values. It is the network as a whole that is the actor and the actor is always a network. Let us therefore ask: What do networks want? What are the norms inherent in the affordances of ICTs?

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Is There Such a Thing as “Informational Privacy”?

The concept of “information” is not very informative. This is because there are so many different meanings to the word. Almost every scientific discipline has their own definition, from physics and chemistry to biology, informatics, mathematics, philosophy, and even sociology, which has long been talking about an “information society.” So what does “information” mean? What is information? Obviously, we need to decide, that is, to filter out much of what can be discussed about the topic and select those meanings of the term that are useful for our purpose, namely, attempting to understand what is meant by informational privacy.

According to the classic definition of Alan Westin (Privacy and Freedom 1967), privacy is “the ability to determine for ourselves when, how, and to what extent information about us is communicated to others.” This definition carries with it several important implications. First, privacy is a matter of information. This information must in some way be “about” us, that is, us “personally.” Privacy therefore has to do with a specific kind of information, namely, “personal information,” or as it later became known, “personally identifiable information” (PII). Another important implication of Westin’s understanding of privacy is that it is not the information itself that is most important, but rather the “ability to determine” what information is communicated to others. Privacy therefore does not primarily reside in any particular informational content, for example, information that would somehow describe a person so intimately that he or she would not be able to communicate it without losing privacy. On the contrary, it would seem that privacy resides above all in the freedom to communicate or not to communicate information, whatever it may be. For example, it could be argued that our genome is so personal and intimate that any communication of our genome to others would automatically constitute a violation of privacy. The implication of Westin’s definition, however, is that we could well determine to do so, that is, if we wanted, we could publish our genome on the internet for the world to see and this would not constitute a violation of privacy. If someone else however, for example, our doctor were to do this without our consent, then, of course, this would constitute a violation of privacy. Privacy is therefore a matter of consent, of decision, of freedom and choice and does not reside in any particular information. This means that privacy consists primarily in the will, in the act of deciding to communicate. Only if my free choice about communicating information is infringed upon can we speak of a violation of my privacy. Finally, Westin’s definition assumes that privacy essentially has to do with communication, that is, privacy is the right to communicate or not to communicate. A right to privacy in this sense only makes sense, however, if communication is an option, something we can choose to do or not do. This means that Watzlawick must have been wrong when he stated that “we cannot not communicate.” If human beings are essentially social and human existence is constituted by communication this would make privacy as Westin defines it impossible. Only if information about a person is something that is not necessarily and automatically communicatively constituted and distributed in social space can privacy be possible.

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