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Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies

Public Goods From Private Data: An Effectiveness And Justification Dilemma For Digital Contact Tracing, Andrew Buzzell Apr 2022

Public Goods From Private Data: An Effectiveness And Justification Dilemma For Digital Contact Tracing, Andrew Buzzell

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Debate about the adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps to control the spread of COVID-19 has focussed on risks to individual privacy. This emphasis reveals significant challenges to ethical deployment of DCT, but generates constraints which undermine justification to implement DCT. It would be a mistake to view this result solely as the successful operation of ethical foresight analysis, preventing deployment of potentially harmful technology. Privacy-centric analysis treats data as private property, frames the relationship between individuals and governments as adversarial, entrenches technology platforms as gatekeepers, and supports a conception of emergency public health authority as limited by individual …


The Law Of Black Mirror - Syllabus, Yafit Lev-Aretz, Nizan Packin Aug 2020

The Law Of Black Mirror - Syllabus, Yafit Lev-Aretz, Nizan Packin

Open Educational Resources

Using episodes from the show Black Mirror as a study tool - a show that features tales that explore techno-paranoia - the course analyzes legal and policy considerations of futuristic or hypothetical case studies. The case studies tap into the collective unease about the modern world and bring up a variety of fascinating key philosophical, legal, and economic-based questions.


From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin May 2020

From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Privacy is increasingly important in an age of facial recognition technologies, mass data collection, and algorithmic decision-making. Yet it persists as a contested term, a behavioural paradox, and often fails users in practice. This article critiques current methods of thinking privacy in protectionist terms, building on Deleuze's conception of the society of control, through its problematic relation to freedom, property and power. Instead, a new mode of understanding privacy in terms of performativity is provided, drawing on Butler and Sedgwick as well as Cohen and Nissenbaum. This new form of privacy is based on identity, consent and collective action, a …


Free Speech And The Myth Of The Internet As An Unintermediated Experience, Christopher S. Yoo Sep 2010

Free Speech And The Myth Of The Internet As An Unintermediated Experience, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, a growing number of commentators have raised concerns that the decisions made by Internet intermediaries — including last-mile network providers, search engines, social networking sites, and smartphones — are inhibiting free speech and have called for restrictions on their ability to prioritize or exclude content. Such calls ignore the fact that when mass communications are involved, intermediation helps end users to protect themselves from unwanted content and allows them to sift through the avalanche of desired content that grows ever larger every day. Intermediation also helps solve a number of classic economic problems associated with the Internet. …


National Security: The Social Implications Of The Politics Of Transparency, M G. Michael, Katina Michael May 2008

National Security: The Social Implications Of The Politics Of Transparency, M G. Michael, Katina Michael

M. G. Michael

This special issue of Prometheus is dedicated to the theme of the Social Implications of National Security Measures on Citizens and Business. National security measures can be defined as those technical and non-technical measures that have been initiated as a means to curb breaches in national security, irrespective of whether these might occur by nationals or aliens in or from outside the sovereign state. National security includes such government priorities as maintaining border control, safeguarding against pandemic outbreaks, preventing acts of terror, and even discovering and eliminating identification fraud. Governments worldwide are beginning to implement information and communication security techniques …


Privacy, Value And Control Issues In Four Mobile Business Applications, Benjamin D. Renegar, Katina Michael, M G. Michael May 2008

Privacy, Value And Control Issues In Four Mobile Business Applications, Benjamin D. Renegar, Katina Michael, M G. Michael

M. G. Michael

This paper presents four case studies that explore the adoption and acceptance of mobile technologies and services within the context of the privacy-value-control (PVC) trichotomy. The technologies studied include: the mobile phone, electronic toll payment tags, e-passports, and loyalty card programs. The study shows that despite the potential barriers to adoption in each of the depicted cases, the applications were embraced with great success soon after their introduction. An understanding of why these mobile innovations succeeded in spite of the concerns surrounding them will serve to help practitioners understand other issues currently plaguing emerging technologies like radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags …