The individual, identity and ethics
How does the individual exist within our networked digital society? How do we control our online identity? Can we apply offline ethics to online?
Contents
1. Introduction
How does the individual exist within our networked digital society? Does our online identity matter and how can we control it? Can we apply the ethics and morality of our offline lives to our digital existence or do we need a new ethics for this sphere? In this topic we will consider all of these questions and ask you to pose your own. Through engaging with the content and each other we might even come to some answers.
In this topic you will:
- Look at what ethics are.
- Consider what it means to live in a digital world and how we behave online.
- Think about who owns and controls our personal data.
2. Ethics
Ethics are the ‘moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity’. Anyone who has seen Netflix’s ‘The Good Place’ will have witnessed the mind-boggling number of positions thinkers in this field have taken, often in an attempt to systematise the vast array of human behaviours into those that are ‘good’ and those that are ‘bad’. The study of ethics has been around as long as humans have been able to reflect on morality. A major question within ethics is “what is the best way to live?” With so much of our lives online, do we need a new ethics for the internet age?
✅ Poll
Read the following prompt then vote below. All responses are anonymous.
Do you think that we can apply the same rules to our online lives as we do to our offline lives?
Computer and information ethics
Recognising the need to create a system of ethics for the information age is nothing new. As early as the 1940s, the founder of this field, Norbert Wiener, foresaw the coming of a “second industrial revolution” and the new ethical challenges this would pose.
Later, and unaware of Wiener’s work on computer ethics, Walter Maner at Old Dominion University considered computer ethics to be the study of ethical issues that are “aggravated, transformed or created by computer technology”.
💬 Contribute
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
What issues do you think are “aggravated, transformed or created” by the internet?
We will now look at some of the ethical issues which could not have arisen without the advent of the internet.
3. Living in a digital world
One issue which has been ‘created’ is the existence of a digital record of our past behaviours and online interactions. Whereas our words and actions might previously have been known (and remembered) by those we had come into contact with, and perhaps spread second-hand to others, our online words and deeds might now be seen by a much larger audience and be available for all to see and find in perpetuity (or at least as long as the platforms we use are online).
One ethical question we might ask is “do we have the right to be forgotten?” Article 17 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) outlines that we have the right to have our personal information erased from the internet. The ruling does not apply in all circumstances and, unlike the internet itself, is limited geographically.
There are other occasions when we would like the actions of our past selves to be forgotten. This can be difficult when our past selves have carried out these actions online!
Let’s start with Mhairi Black, the SNP Member of Parliament (MP) for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. She was elected in 2015 at the age of 20 years and 237 days, and still completing her undergraduate degree. At the time she was the youngest MP to be elected since 1832!
MP’s standards are a hot topic right now and their rights to a personal life prior to public office might be debated elsewhere. Mhairi is part of a generation of MPs whose personal life prior to being elected has been captured in her social media interactions on Twitter. Some of her Tweets might be exactly the kind of thing we’d expect from a teenager on that platform: funny, sweary and irreverent. You can read all about them here and see how her use of social media has developed (while maintaining her humorous approach) here.
It does seem odd reading these Tweets and knowing they came from a sitting MP. What do you think? How should our past (and perhaps childhood) interactions with social media affect our adult selves?
✅ Poll
Read the following prompt then vote below. All responses are anonymous.
Should the online actions of our childhoods be assessed differently from those of our adulthood?
💬 Contribute
Teenage Tweets about underage alcopop drinking might be a bit embarrassing but we can think of plenty of examples of historic social media posts that are completely offensive. Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
The words and actions we share online are difficult to erase. Does the eternal memory of the Internet allow individuals to change their opinions, improve their behaviours and grow as human beings? Where do we draw the line on which past actions are forgivable or permissible?
Share your comments, opinions and examples in the comment stream below. We promise we won’t hold you to those opinions forever…!
4. Data security
Information has always had value and keeping it safe has been a concern since that information could be first shared. It is undoubted that the internet has aggravated the issue of keeping information from falling into the wrong hands. It seems to be an almost monthly occurrence that personal, company or state information is leaked on the internet. Along with the multitude of targets for these leaks are the individuals, groups and organisations doing the leaking, each with their own reasons for doing so. Some will garner more public sympathy than others, millionaire tax dodgers tend not to prompt too many tears, as we saw with the release of the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and most recently, Pandora Papers. But how would we feel if it was our information leaked? Or if we were the source or owners of that information?
We’re still seeing the fallout from this most recent leak at the time of writing, and with 2.94 terabytes of data to process we won’t have heard the last from it. Several world leaders have been linked to the leaks and forced to deny financial wrong-doing.
The Panama Papers were a 2016 leak of documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The papers show how the firm’s clients were able to avoid tax and launder money through a range of secretive and nefarious means. Many of us would agree that illegally avoiding tax and laundering money is wrong. Does that make the leak of these documents right?
How do you react to Ramon Fonseca, partner at Mossack Fonseca:
“We are amazed that nobody has said ‘Hey, a crime has been committed here…’ The world is already accepting that privacy is not a human right”
Ramon Fonseca, partner at Mossack Fonseca
💬 Contribute
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Is Ramon Fonseca right to say his company’s information was stolen and this is the real crime?
The Panama Papers leak revealed details of individuals accused of partaking in the illegal activity of tax evasion and money laundering, with criminal investigations following. How do we feel about the leak of activities in which no illegality was involved?
In 2015, user data was stolen from the Ashley Madison, a Canadian dating site catering, its tagline suggests, for ‘ bored men & lonely housewives’, a site facilitating affairs. The group responsible for the data breach threatened to release the details of site users if the site (and sister sites) were not taken down. We might think that having an affair is morally wrong but it is certainly not illegal. Do we feel differently about this leak and if so, why?
💬 Contribute
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Do we feel differently about the Ashley Madison leak and if so, why?
There are many more examples of data leaks and breaches and the ethical quandaries they pose. You need only look to WikiLeaks to rouse the full range of responses in yourself, from information that was in the public interest and challenged the authority of the powerful, to releases that posed a threat to national security or the safety of individuals.
✍ Write a response
Scroll to the bottom of this Medium story to write a response. Make sure you are logged in with the Medium account you are using for the Digital Society course.
What do you think about the ethics of information online? When does the right to privacy become less important than the public’s right to know? Who gets to decide?
After you have written your response, feel free to comment on someone else’s response and ‘clap’ for any responses you appreciate.
5. Online behaviour
Throughout this course we have looked at the many benefits the internet has brought to us and the new ways we can engage with the world and each other online. With these increased possibilities come increased opportunities to behave in negative ways. How do we consider what is acceptable behaviour online? If we need a new ethics for our online lives, how do we apply this to the behaviour of the individual? When is anonymity a necessity and when is it a nuisance (or worse)? Let’s consider some of these new ways of misbehaving online, the negative impacts of which have been aggravated, transformed or created by the internet.
Freedom of speech — freedom to abuse, bully and troll?
The right to free speech is a cornerstone of liberal democracy. To be free to express our opinions, however unpopular they might be, is a right many of us enjoy. The definition and boundaries of this right change constantly as societies look to find the balance between freedom to express and freedom from abuse.
The internet is not the first disruptive technology to affect this balance. From the printing press, to newspapers, to radio, to television, the audience for our free speech has continually increased. The internet has taken this up a notch, to say the least! If we start with a potential audience of 4.33 billion, add anonymity and the ability to reply instantly, we can see the difficulties in finding a balance.
💬 Contribute
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
‘Trolling’ is an unwanted product of these circumstances. How would you define trolling?
However we define this behaviour we will find others who disagree, behaviours we see as bullying or aggravating an issue might be considered a valid response.
6. AI and the future of online ethics
AI and machine learning can be used for different purposes, often far outstretching human capabilities and can be useful for tasks humans find difficult or even boring. But how do we feel about turning AI onto one of the tasks that seem central to our humanity, making moral judgments?
“Delphi is a research prototype designed to model people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations. This demo shows the abilities and limitations of state-of-the-art models today.”
The Delphi team are making their first steps in exploring the potential (and limitations) of ‘machine ethics’. You can find out more about the aims of the project and its potential uses on their FAQs page.
Try entering an ethical question into Ask Delphi. Do you agree with its judgment? How do you feel about the possibilities of AI’s interaction with ethics? Let us know in the comments.
Please note Delphi’s advice:
Model outputs should not be used for advice for humans, and could be potentially offensive, problematic, or harmful. The model’s output does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the authors and their associated affiliations.
7. Summary
In this topic we’ve looked at what ethics are and asked whether there’s a difference between how we view ethics in our offline and online lives.
Are ethics universal, or do we adapt them to fit the sphere we’re operating in at the time? For example, most people would agree that stealing a VHS video from Blockbusters is (was!) wrong, but what about downloading a digital copy of a movie from an illegal file sharing site? In both cases we end up with a film we’ve not paid for, but do we view one crime as more acceptable than the other. Actually, do we even view the file download as being wrong?
And if our online ethics are different, what about our online behaviour too? Does being online make us more likely or less likely to be kind to a stranger or to insult someone we disagree with?
We’ve also looked at how we as individuals exist within our networked digital society, how our past online behaviour has the potential to come back and bite us in the present (and future), and how we control our online identity and personal data.
