Introduction
During
a
conference on ethical issues of the information society in January
2011, a
colleague told me about family problems dealing with privacy in social
networks, and particularly on what his children do or do not with their
personal data. Young people, he said, are fascinated by the
opportunities
offered by social networks, such as making friends, sharing personal
issues or
just having fun together. A young woman who was taking part at this
conversation said: "I never enter my real data, that is to say, I try
to avoid
personal identification by giving, for instance, wrong data concerning
my place
of birth or age or whatever." I told her: "This looks like a
Nietzschean
imperative: ‘Learn to lie if you want to survive in a digital
environment!’." "Not
bad for an ethicist," she said. Then she added: "But what happens if
everybody follows this maxime?" This is a Kantian question, of course.
The consequences
would be
very bad – not only for Mr Zuckerberg.
February 8, 2011 was "Safer Internet Day" organised
by Insafe "to
promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile
phones,
especially amongst children and young people across the world" this
year around
the slogan "It’s more than a game, it’s your life." The present debate
or, I
should better say, the present obsession over privacy and security is
on
shaping freedom in the digital age. It is still unclear what is
precisely the
impact of ICT and particularly of social media such as Twitter or
Facebook on
recent social protests for instance in the Near
East
(Wikipedia 2011). But it seems unquestionable that ICT is changing the
"web of
relationships" or the "in-between" that binds us, to put it in Hannah
Arendt’s
terms (Arendt 1998, 182). What makes this debate on ICT and social life
unique is
the fact that it takes place at a local and global level with different
forms
of synergy related to questions of friendship and fun no less than of
oppression
and justice. It is a debate about possible shapes of the "vita activa"
(H.
Arendt) in the digital age. It starts at a very young age when kids
learn being
online (Insafe 2011). Sherry Turkle has analyzed the paradoxes arising
from
what she calls being "alone together" (Turkle 2011). Maybe it is not so
much
the fear of being alone but of being lonely and isolated or even
excluded from
social relationships. We do not learn to be alone but we do learn new
ways of being together (Capurro 1995). We look for new codes of
being together. They arise from a broad social and academic debate
where traditional norms and rules are challenged and 'good practices'
are analyzed. These
questions are at the core of the academic debate on information ethics
(Himma and Tavani 2008).
On Information Ethics and Information Moralities
The task
of ethics as an academic discipline is to problematize a given
morality. The
alternative is a sclerotic social life in which a morality with its
rules,
taboos, values and bias of all kinds, is considered as obvious and
unchangeable
being mostly used as power instrument to legitimate hierarchies and
privileges.
Morality and ethics as its catalyst are essential for survival in a
similar way
as any living organism needs an immune system in order to deal with the
environment.
Information ethics is the academic discipline
dealing with the critical
reflection on information moralities, particularly but not restricted
to the
impact of ICT on norms and values in human communication. In a broader
sense,
information ethics deals with comparative descriptive and normative
studies of
information moralities related to other media and as well as to
different
epochs and cultures. Eventually, information ethics might address today
the
impact of ICT on norms and values in all areas of human society
including its
interaction with nature and non-human living beings.
The difference between ethics (philosophia
ethiké)
or moral philosophy – that together with the reflection on
politics (philosophia politiké) and on the
administration of
the house (philosophia oikonomiké) belong to
what
Aristotle calls practical philosophy (philosophia
praktiké) – and morality
(Greek: ethos, Latin: mores) is
essential in order not to confuse a theory with
its
object. In everyday life, and sometimes also in academia, both terms,
ethics
and morality, are used as synonyms, thereby creating confusion. Ethics
committees turn
sometimes into moral ones. In today's understanding, ethics deals with
the whole of human action in all its spheres (individual, group,
society) within the limits of the conditio
humana. The so-called applied ethics, such as bioethics,
business ethics, ecological ethics etc., take a specific perspective on
such spheres of human practices.
On Privacy and Secrecy
In her
book "Privacy in Context" media theorist Helen Nissenbaum rightly
criticizes the
public/privacy
dichotomy as detached from specific contexts. Within such contexts,
norms
provide the framework for what she calls "contextual integrity."
"Contexts," she
writes, "are structured social settings characterized by canonical
activities,
roles, relationships, power structures, norms (or rules), and internal
values
(goals, ends, purposes)." (Nissenbaum 2010, 132). Niklas Luhmann's
system theory calls such contexts "systems" (Luhmann 1996). This is a
theoretical
perspective that Nissenbaum also implicitly shares with hermeneutics
according to
which the process of understanding a text in what it says and what
remains
hidden is related to a framework of
"pre-understanding" of both, the author and the reader, that can be
made
explicit through interpretation, leading to understanding and to a new
pre-understanding. Philosophical hermeneutics, as developed by
Hans-Georg
Gadamer (1975) following Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics, further
developed this issue with regard to our own understanding as human
beings. The
encounter between existential hermeneutics and the theory of
computerized information storage
and
retrieval in the 1980s (Capurro 1986, Winograd and Flores 1986) was
a forerunner of Nissenbaum's contextual thinking. The success of the
WWW is due not only to its globality but also to its locality. New
mobile applications allowing to physically localize people as well as
any kind of objects show clearly the relevance of contextuality.
Social life is about concealing and unconcealing who we are according
to different forms of trust and security.
We are neither a society of angels nor one of devils, neither a fully
open society nor a secret one. This is the reason why the difference
between public and private as
well as
between public and secret is so relevant for every human society
(Capurro and Capurro 2007). The
concepts
of public and private do not refer to properties of data. They are not
first-order
concepts. Data and their properties play different roles related to
what they
conceal and unconceal in different contexts of social life. Public vs
private
no less than public vs secret are second-order concepts. In other
words, their
understanding with regard to the data depends on the specific social
interplay.
This contextual relativity should not be misunderstood at the normative
level
as a moral relativism but as a necessity to specify which norms and
values are
at stake in a specific context. Let us take for instance the proposal
of my
colleague ‘never enter your real data’ in, for instance, an online
community
like Facebook and in a
scientific community. Am I morally obliged to
unconceal
my personal data in a context dealing with fun and friendship
following, for instance, Facebook's
"Statement of Rights and Resonsibilities" (Facebook 2011)? Can I
conceal
my real identity, my name for instance, using a pseudonym? If such a
norm is
not specified by the community nothing seems to be against it. I am not
lying
in this case but just playing a social game although the creator of the
software might expect the contrary and try to use my data for other
purposes. My
virtual friends may or may not expect that my data are correct or that
I might conceal
or change them. In case of the scientific community its ethos
implies that I do not conceal my name except, for instance,
with regard to exceptional political situations (Strauss 1988). This
rule
applies vice versa: I should not omit or conceal my sources,
particularly in the
case of quotations but also of giving credit to authors that are the
immediate
source of ‘my’ ideas. Plagiarism in science is no less morally and
legally
reprehensible than fakes in industry and the arts.The
question as to whether
my name, address, affiliation and so on are private or public, or if I
may conceal or reveal them depends on the context in which they
are embedded.
This takes us to the problem of "maintaining
multiple personas online"
as Michael Zimmer remarks with regard to his ambiguous experiences with
Moli,
a platform that makes it possible to separate, for instance, personal
and
professional lives, which is difficult to do with Facebook (Zimmer
2008; Naone 2008). The
problem is, as Zimmer remarks, "[w]hile I can set the privacy levels
for each
profile, Moli gets
to see it all… all
linked to my single account with a common e-mail address, zip code,
birthdate
and gender." (ibid.) This case clearly shows the problems of data
protection
and data exchange between different contexts. In this case it is a
matter of a
commercial platform but what if this is done by political power?
Conclusion
What lessons can we learn so far? We live in a digital era in which the
habeas corpus mutates into habeas
data (EGE 2005, 29): ‘We shall not lay
digital hand upon thee.’ But the question
is how this legal procedure can be applied in a globalized world, or,
who is
this ‘we’ and what kind of ‘hands’ can be laid upon which (digital)
bodies. In
other words, the question of informed consent, a leading principle in
medical
ethics, should be a major technical, ethical, and legal issue with
regard to all
kinds of personal data in different contexts.
The pragmatic
imperative: ‘Learn to contextualize!’ is an educational problem
starting at a
very early age. Where it is said: ‘enter your name’ you should enter
your
nickname. It is just for fun, after all. This is a kind of guerilla
tactic in a
complex digital environment that might help to make not so easy the
connection
between data coming from different contexts without the explicit
consent of the
person(s) or institutions involved. The design of platforms for
children and
young people can provide different ways of
making this contextuality technically
possible and understandable. But this needs a complement in moral and
ethical
education
at home and in school. Guerrilla tactics is in some way a fight against
digital
giants. It needs a legal supplement making the case of data migration
between
contexts an issue for the legal protection of individual freedom. Data
protection is
about freedom not just about data. Allowing political, commercial and
economic
power
unlimited access and transfer of data arising from different
contexts with
different moral and legal rules means nothing less than undermining
"contextual integrity" and it can be a precursor of
various
kinds of digital totalitarianism. This is particularly the case when
every
human being can be
digitally
identified and this code becomes even a legal must for all kinds of
digital
transactions in
whatever context and for whatever purpose.
Acknowledgements
Thanks
to Michael Eldred (Cologne) and Daniel Nagel (Stuttgart) for their
corrections and suggestions.
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Last
update: September 30, 2015