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2523Social Media, Emergent Manipulation, and Political LegitimacyIn Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation, Routledge. pp. 353-369. 2022.Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as…Read more
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2466Student Privacy in Learning Analytics: An Information Ethics PerspectiveThe Information Society 32 (2): 143-159. 2016.In recent years, educational institutions have started using the tools of commercial data analytics in higher education. By gathering information about students as they navigate campus information systems, learning analytics “uses analytic techniques to help target instructional, curricular, and support resources” to examine student learning behaviors and change students’ learning environments. As a result, the information educators and educational institutions have at their disposal is no longe…Read more
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1067Agency Laundering and Information TechnologiesEthical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (4): 1017-1041. 2019.When agents insert technological systems into their decision-making processes, they can obscure moral responsibility for the results. This can give rise to a distinct moral wrong, which we call “agency laundering.” At root, agency laundering involves obfuscating one’s moral responsibility by enlisting a technology or process to take some action and letting it forestall others from demanding an account for bad outcomes that result. We argue that the concept of agency laundering helps in understan…Read more
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1006Algorithms, Agency, and Respect for PersonsSocial Theory and Practice 46 (3): 547-572. 2020.Algorithmic systems and predictive analytics play an increasingly important role in various aspects of modern life. Scholarship on the moral ramifications of such systems is in its early stages, and much of it focuses on bias and harm. This paper argues that in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems it is essential to understand the relation between algorithms, autonomy, and agency. We draw on several recent cases in criminal sentencing and K–12 teacher evaluation to outline fou…Read more
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863Democratic Obligations and Technological Threats to Legitimacy: PredPol, Cambridge Analytica, and Internet Research AgencyIn Alan Rubel, Clinton Castro & Adam Pham (eds.), Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems, Cambridge University Press. pp. 163-183. 2021.ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise …Read more
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730Libraries, Electronic Resources, and Privacy: The Case for Positive Intellectual FreedomLibrary Quarterly 84 (2): 183-208. 2014.Public and research libraries have long provided resources in electronic formats, and the tension between providing electronic resources and patron privacy is widely recognized. But assessing trade-offs between privacy and access to electronic resources remains difficult. One reason is a conceptual problem regarding intellectual freedom. Traditionally, the LIS literature has plausibly understood privacy as a facet of intellectual freedom. However, while certain types of electronic resource use m…Read more
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692Privacy, Transparency, and Accountability in the NSA’s Bulk Metadata ProgramIn Adam D. Moore (ed.), Privacy, Security and Accountability: Ethics, Law and Policy, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 183-202. 2015.Disputes at the intersection of national security, surveillance, civil liberties, and transparency are nothing new, but they have become a particularly prominent part of public discourse in the years since the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001. This is in part due to the dramatic nature of those attacks, in part based on significant legal developments after the attacks (classifying persons as “enemy combatants” outside the scope of traditional Geneva protections, legal memos by…Read more
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680Epistemic Paternalism OnlineIn Guy Axtell & Amiel Bernal (eds.), Epistemic Paternalism: Conceptions, Justifications and Implications, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 29-44. 2020.New media (highly interactive digital technology for creating, sharing, and consuming information) affords users a great deal of control over their informational diets. As a result, many users of new media unwittingly encapsulate themselves in epistemic bubbles (epistemic structures, such as highly personalized news feeds, that leave relevant sources of information out (Nguyen forthcoming)). Epistemically paternalistic alterations to new media technologies could be made to pop at least some epis…Read more
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679Privacy and the USA patriot act: Rights, the value of rights, and autonomyLaw and Philosophy 26 (2): 119-159. 2007.Civil liberty and privacy advocates have criticized the USA PATRIOT Act (Act) on numerous grounds since it was passed in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Two of the primary targets of those criticisms are the Act’s sneak-and-peek search provision, which allows law enforcement agents to conduct searches without informing the search’s subjects, and the business records provision, which allows agents to secretly subpoena a variety of information – most notoriously, library borrow…Read more
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655A matter of trust: : Higher education institutions as information fiduciaries in an age of educational data mining and learning analyticsJASIST: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. forthcoming.Higher education institutions are mining and analyzing student data to effect educational, political, and managerial outcomes. Done under the banner of “learning analytics,” this work can—and often does—surface sensitive data and information about, inter alia, a student’s demographics, academic performance, offline and online movements, physical fitness, mental wellbeing, and social network. With these data, institutions and third parties are able to describe student life, predict future behavio…Read more
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639The Temptation of Data-enabled Surveillance: Are Universities the Next Cautionary Tale?Communications of the Acm 4 (63): 22-24. 2020.There is increasing concern about “surveillance capitalism,” whereby for-profit companies generate value from data, while individuals are unable to resist (Zuboff 2019). Non-profits using data-enabled surveillance receive less attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs) have embraced data analytics, but the wide latitude that private, profit-oriented enterprises have to collect data is inappropriate. HEIs have a fiduciary relationship to students, not a narrowly transactional one (see Jones …Read more
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600Data Analytics in Higher Education: Key Concerns and Open QuestionsUniversity of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy 1 (11): 25-44. 2017.“Big Data” and data analytics affect all of us. Data collection, analysis, and use on a large scale is an important and growing part of commerce, governance, communication, law enforcement, security, finance, medicine, and research. And the theme of this symposium, “Individual and Informational Privacy in the Age of Big Data,” is expansive; we could have long and fruitful discussions about practices, laws, and concerns in any of these domains. But a big part of the audience for this symposium is…Read more
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551A Framework for Analyzing and Comparing Privacy StatesJASIST: The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 65 (12): 2422-2431. 2014.This article develops a framework for analyzing and comparing privacy and privacy protections across (inter alia) time, place, and polity and for examining factors that affect privacy and privacy protection. This framework provides a method to describe precisely aspects of privacy and context and a flexible vocabulary and notation for such descriptions and comparisons. Moreover, it links philosophical and conceptual work on privacy to social science and policy work and accommodates different con…Read more
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546Justifying Public Health Surveillance: Basic Interests, Unreasonable Exercise, and PrivacyKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22 (1): 1-33. 2012.Surveillance plays a crucial role in public health, and for obvious reasons conflicts with individual privacy. This paper argues that the predominant approach to the conflict is problematic, and then offers an alternative. It outlines a Basic Interests Approach to public health measures, and the Unreasonable Exercise Argument, which sets forth conditions under which individuals may justifiably exercise individual privacy claims that conflict with public health goals. The view articulated is comp…Read more
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520The Particularized Judgment Account of PrivacyRes Publica 17 (3): 275-290. 2011.Questions of privacy have become particularly salient in recent years due, in part, to information-gathering initiatives precipitated by the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, increasing power of surveillance and computing technologies, and massive data collection about individuals for commercial purposes. While privacy is not new to the philosophical and legal literature, there is much to say about the nature and value of privacy. My focus here is on the nature of informational privacy. I argue t…Read more
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503Privacy, Ethics, and Institutional ResearchNew Directions in Institutional Research 2019 (183): 5-16. 2019.Despite widespread agreement that privacy in the context of education is important, it can be difficult to pin down precisely why and to what extent it is important, and it is challenging to determine how privacy is related to other important values. But that task is crucial. Absent a clear sense of what privacy is, it will be difficult to understand the scope of privacy protections in codes of ethics. Moreover, privacy will inevitably conflict with other values, and understanding the values tha…Read more
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494What We Informationally Owe Each OtherIn Alan Rubel, Clinton Castro & Adam Pham (eds.), Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems, Cambridge University Press. pp. 21-42. 2021.ABSTRACT: One important criticism of algorithmic systems is that they lack transparency. Such systems can be opaque because they are complex, protected by patent or trade secret, or deliberately obscure. In the EU, there is a debate about whether the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contains a “right to explanation,” and if so what such a right entails. Our task in this chapter is to address this informational component of algorithmic systems. We argue that information access is integra…Read more
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454Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America – By Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove (review)Review of Policy Research 26 633-634. 2009.Review of Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America – By Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove
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451Four Facets of Privacy and Intellectual Freedom in Licensing Contracts for Electronic JournalsCollege and Research Libraries 4 (76): 427-449. 2015.This is a study of the treatment of library patron privacy in licenses for electronic journals in academic libraries. We begin by distinguishing four facets of privacy and intellectual freedom based on the LIS and philosophical literature. Next, we perform a content analysis of 42 license agreements for electronic journals, focusing on terms for enforcing authorized use and collection and sharing of user data. We compare our findings to model licenses, to recommendations proposed in a recent tre…Read more
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348Legal Archetypes and Metadata CollectionWisconsin International Law Review 34 (4): 823-853. 2017.In discussions of state surveillance, the values of privacy and security are often set against one another, and people often ask whether privacy is more important than national security.2 I will argue that in one sense privacy is more important than national security. Just what more important means is its own question, though, so I will be more precise. I will argue that national security rationales cannot by themselves justify some kinds of encroachments on individual privacy (including some ki…Read more
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274Does Predictive Sentencing Make Sense?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.This paper examines the practice of using predictive systems to lengthen the prison sentences of convicted persons when the systems forecast a higher likelihood of re-offense or re-arrest. There has been much critical discussion of technologies used for sentencing, including questions of bias and opacity. However, there hasn’t been a discussion of whether this use of predictive systems makes sense in the first place. We argue that it does not by showing that there is no plausible theory of punis…Read more
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167Bias in Information, Algorithms, and SystemsIn Jo Bates, Paul D. Clough, Robert Jäschke & Jahna Otterbacher (eds.), Proceedings of the International Workshop on Bias in Information, Algorithms, and Systems (BIAS), . pp. 9-13. 2018.We argue that an essential element of understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems requires an analysis of the relation between algorithms and agency. We outline six key ways in which issues of agency, autonomy, and respect for persons can conflict with algorithmic decision-making.
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153Agency Laundering and Algorithmic Decision SystemsIn N. Taylor, C. Christian-Lamb, M. Martin & B. Nardi (eds.), Information in Contemporary Society (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Springer Nature. pp. 590-598. 2019.This paper has two aims. The first is to explain a type of wrong that arises when agents obscure responsibility for their actions. Call it “agency laundering.” The second is to use the concept of agency laundering to understand the underlying moral issues in a number of recent cases involving algorithmic decision systems. From the Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, iConference 2019, Washington D.C., March 31-April 3, 2019.
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138Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision SystemsCambridge University Press. 2021.Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work… the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predi…Read more
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112Respecting the autonomy of european and american consumers: Defending positive labels on gm foodsJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18 (1): 75-84. 2004.In her recent article, Does autonomy count in favor of labeling genetically modified food?, Kirsten Hansen argues that in Europe, voluntary negative labeling of non-GM foods respects consumer autonomy just as well as mandatory positive labeling of foods with GM content. She also argues that because negative labeling places labeling costs upon those consumers that want to know whether food is GM, negative labeling is better policy than positive labeling. In this paper, we argue that Hansens argum…Read more
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97Privacy and ethics in brain-computer interface researchIn Eran Klein & Alan Rubel (eds.), Brain–Computer Interfaces Handbook: Technological and Theoretical Advances. pp. 653-655. 2018.Neural engineers and clinicians are starting to translate advances in electrodes, neural computation, and signal processing into clinically useful devices to allow control of wheelchairs, spellers, prostheses, and other devices. In the process, large amounts of brain data are being generated from participants, including intracortical, subdural and extracranial sources. Brain data is a vital resource for BCI research but there are concerns about whether the collection and use of this data generat…Read more
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79Privacy and Positive Intellectual FreedomJournal of Social Philosophy 45 (3): 390-407. 2014.Privacy is often linked to freedom. Protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is a hallmark of a free society, and pervasive state‐sponsored surveillance is generally considered to correlate closely with authoritarianism. One link between privacy and freedom is prominent in the library and information studies field and has recently been receiving attention in legal and philosophical scholarship. Specifically, scholars and professionals argue that privacy is an essential component of …Read more
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76The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information, by Frank Pasquale. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 320 pp. ISBN 978–0674368279 (review)Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (4): 568-571. 2016.
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74Recommendations for Responsible Development and Application of NeurotechnologiesNeuroethics 14 (3): 365-386. 2021.Advancements in novel neurotechnologies, such as brain computer interfaces and neuromodulatory devices such as deep brain stimulators, will have profound implications for society and human rights. While these technologies are improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental and neurological diseases, they can also alter individual agency and estrange those using neurotechnologies from their sense of self, challenging basic notions of what it means to be human. As an international coalition of int…Read more
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51Medical privacy and the public's right to vote: What presidential candidates should discloseJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (4). 2006.We argue that while presidential candidates have the right to medical privacy, the public nature and importance of the presidency generates a moral requirement that candidates waive those rights in certain circumstances. Specifically, candidates are required to disclose information about medical conditions that are likely to seriously undermine their ability to fulfill what we call the "core functions" of the office of the presidency. This requirement exists because (1) people have the right to …Read more
Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Technology Ethics |