Who Watches the Watchmen?

Imagining the future

Emerging technologies and the internet are transforming our lives in unimaginable proportions. Each and every passing day, somewhere in the world, news about new technological advancement keeps popping up which promises a better future for all of mankind. Just like coins have two sides, these technologies are also bringing considerable downsides. Thus far all the arguments are mainly directed towards advantages and disadvantages or dangers of digital technology and the internet; not about the unique ethical dilemmas, the emerging technologies bring upon the world.

Now more than ever, the time has come to finally address the ethical issues since technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Bigdata and AI have reached a point where we cannot simply ignore the ethical aspects they bring into question. Let’s take two examples to prove the validity of this statement. First, recently there was a huge discussion recently on sites like Stack Overflow, Hacker News among programmer about whether it is ethical to secretly automate their jobs without informing the employers (Bort, 2017). This was triggered after an employee posted a  question asking his peer programmers to help him decide whether what he does is ethical or not. Based on the discussion on that topic, the programmers were split on whether or not his behaviour was unethical. Some of them argued since the company got what it was paying for, it shouldn't matter how the job is done, whereas others thought this is unethical since the employer is been cheated since the programmers are sitting idly and getting a salary for a job he didn’t do by secretly automating it. 

Similarly, another discussing was also sprung when electric carmaker called “Tesla” announced that their cars will reach full autonomous driving capability by 2019 (Stumpf, 2017). The point of discussion was the moral and ethical dilemmas such as whether to value the lives of passengers or pedestrians more in case of unavoidable accidents that carmakers, car buyers and regulators must address before vehicles should be given full autonomy. Based on the above examples, it could be clearly understood that with every new advancement comes unique ethical dilemmas which have never been previously encountered. It will be extremely difficult to identify and address all the ethical, moral and legal dilemmas that digital technology brings within the scope of this article. So, it is better to choose one important concern that today’s world is facing through advancement in digital technology. The goal of this article is to generate a general blueprint by analysing the ethical, legal and moral dilemmas, that chosen concern brings up, and proposing a solution, through which all other and future dilemmas and concerns can be evaluated with ease. 

The topic which gets the most importance in the recent decade is digital surveillance and snooping. Thanks to famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden now people are both enlightened and concerned about mass surveillance and snooping. This is an important issue in the profession of computing since all the people who create tools to aid these surveillance activities are computing professionals. Snooping both by government and corporates not only affects the individual privacy but also give rise to situations which can endanger principles like democracy, freedom and the pursuit of happiness which are an integral part of our modern society. Technologies such as Big data and AI could turn disastrous in wrong hands. So, let’s choose that topic and dive in to explore this topic much deeply from different sides and find a solution for it. 

Government snooping

The Internet has made the world more connected thus making communication and coordination simpler. In post-Snowden era governments around the world are constantly being accused of spying on its own civilians. But are those accusations are biased towards one side? Important arguments put forward by people against the snooping was, it is a fundamental violation of their privacy and freedom of expression. They fear that these kinds of surveillance will help the government to maintain absolute control over people in the future. Dictatorial states around the world are also afraid of people organising successful protests which can topple the regimes using modern technologies. Social media played a major role in the successful “Arab spring” revolution which toppled several oppressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle east (Srinivasan, 2012). Singapore’s data-controlled society and China’s “Brain Project” which assigns citizen score based on search engine data collected from each user as an example of future possibilities of governments moving toward totalitarian states (Helbing et al., 2017).

 

Figure 1 — Surveillance

Governments and pro-government supporters argue that such surveillance is required to ensure national security since governments around the world are facing difficulties in combating terrorism since planning and coordinating terrorist activities and recruiting people for terror networks have become much simpler (Sheetz, 2015). Recent terrorist attacks in Europe by people who are radicalised by terror masterminds through the internet is a great example in this regard. 

When it comes to consideration of power, possessing information gathered through snooping will give the governments an edge or advantage over public since it enables the government to predict what is going to happen next well before it happens. This will give governments more time to prepare for, tackle or prevent scenarios that the government has interest in. This advantage possessed by the government is like a double-edged sword. This advantage may help to prevent terrorist attacks at the same time this advantage can also be used to identify potential protesters and whistleblowers and suppress them well before they act. Both sides, for and against snooping have valid points to justify their claims, so any solution for this problem should find a middle ground to satisfy both ends.

Corporate snooping

Web-based corporates like Google, Facebook and etc. are constantly monitoring people to provide personalised content and advertising. Cookies now used by most of the website can be used to silently track the user's movement through the web and enable the companies to build a complete profile about yourself through identifying your lifestyle and interests. Even though legal frameworks exist which mandates the website to get consent from the user before deploying cookies. These legal frameworks seem inadequate since the website put the consent message popup in a way that makes users believe it is something very good without saying what information will cookies store. So, the majority of the users who are from non-computing background really has no idea what he is agreeing to when they allow using cookies. 

Loyalty cards and Online shopping have become increasingly popular and this allows retailers to monitor intimate details about your consumption patterns. People who are against such surveillance argue that those snooping is a violation of privacy since their intimate data are analysed and used for profits. Incidents such as a company called “Target” identifying that a teen girl was pregnant even before her own father by observing that girl’s consumption patterns is a great example of privacy concerns caused by corporate snooping(Hill, 2012). Online shopping experimenting with personalised prices as an example for corporate snooping and it violates the principles of “non-discrimination, equality, free-market competition and price transparency”. “It also outlines how these technologies one day will force choices upon us through persuasive computing”(Helbing et al., 2017). 

Corporates and people who support their views argue that by analysing individual data, contents can be personalised and people will get only get what they like rather than things they don’t like hence increasing user happiness. This kind of snooping does have economic and commercial considerations as well, an argument like personalised pricing will help to get reduced prices on items you buy regularly as discounts hence reducing your expense is an example of the importance of economic and commercial considerations. 

Another economic and commercial consideration is, the snooping will help the companies to target advertisements to the right customer hence reducing money spend on advertising to wider audience who are not likely to buy. The profits of the companies will hence increase as the cost of unwanted advertisement reduces and people who buy the product increases. Corporate snooping gives rise to dilemmas between commercial and economic advantages of snooping over the loss of privacy. The supporters for corporate snooping also argue that there is nothing wrong in sacrificing a small amount of privacy to maximum happiness and reduce expenses. Just like government snooping, both sides have valid points, so here also a middle ground needs to be identified to solve the issue.

Discussion and Solution

Having entangled ourselves into all those concerns identified in this chapter, it is time to start thinking about the solution to those problems. First and foremost, the fundamental solution to the privacy issue caused by digital surveillance can be regularised by enacting strong legal frameworks. In today’s world, due to the constant threat of terrorism banning government surveillance is impossible. So, through the legal framework, it should be regularised. As an immediate measure, laws should be enacted to enable recording and do real-time data analysis on personal data but they must be stored encrypted and should only be allowed to be viewed by human eyes after getting permission from a Judge, if data analysis tools raise suspicion on that person, hence any misuse of data is controlled.

When it comes to corporate snooping, the government must enact laws to allow access to private data only after getting consent from the user to observe and analyse the data. The government should also enact laws to give individuals the right to obtain all the information stored about them both by the government and corporates. The consent forms used by corporates should be made more meaningful by giving sample data about what will be captured from user so that the user is fully aware of the consequence of the consent he is giving, rather than putting one or two lines of catchy and manipulative terms or pages and pages of technical jargon which no one understands. The government should ban selling personal data to other organisations without consent. The laws should also ensure that corporate snooping doesn’t violate principles of non-discrimination, equality, free-market competition and price transparency. 

Government snooping can also be checked by a concept called sousveillance (under-sight). “Under-sight is facilitated through civic and technology practices such as better whistle-blower protection, public debate, participatory projects and systems innovations” (Bakir, Feilzer, & McStay, 2017). It is quite evident that the current younger generation is less concerned about privacy. I believe, people should be prepared to give up some privacy in return for greater security as long as there are laws to prevent data misuse.

References

• Bakir, V., Feilzer, M., & McStay, A. (2017). Introduction to Special Theme Veillance and transparency: A critical examination of mutual watching in the post-Snowden, Big Data era. Big Data & Society, 4(1), 205395171769899. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717698996
• Bort, J. (2017). Programmer debate secretly automating their jobs. Retrieved July 15, 2017, from http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-debate-secretly-automating-their-jobs-2017-7
• Helbing, D., Frey, B. S., Gigerenzer, G., Hafen, E., Hagner, M., Hofstetter, Zwitter, A. (2017). Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence? Retrieved June 24, 2017, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-democracy-survive-big-data-and-artificialintelligence/
• Hill, K. (2012). How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. Retrieved July 2, 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targetfigured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#1191e6c76668
• Sheetz, M. (2015). The rise of tech-savvy global terrorism networks. Retrieved from http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/04/the-everyday-technology-helping-terrorists-plot-evil.html
• Srinivasan, R. (2012). Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring. Retrieved July 15, 2017, from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012919115344299848.html
• Stumpf, R. (2017). Elon Musk Predicts Fully Driverless Cars Are Less Than Two Years Away The Drive. Retrieved July 15, 2017, from http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/9822/elon-muskpredicts-fully-driverless-cars-are-less-than-two-years-away.
• Mullikin, A., Syed, & Rahman, M. (2010). The Ethical Dilemma Of The USA Government Wiretapping. International Journal of Managing Information Technology, 2(4), 32–39.
• Vacura, M., 2015. The History of Computer Ethics and Its Future Challenges. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285512569_The_history_of_computer_ethics_and_its_ future_challenges.