Our experience is in the application of ethical principles to questions of online trust and privacy, and digital identity. Our approach is based on the principle of involving and responding to multiple stakeholder interests.
In doing so, we have encountered consistent types of problem, each of which highlights a particular ethical facet of the trust/privacy issue. This paper sets out four such problem types as the basis for:
- multi-stakeholder discussion
- formulation of a candidate problem statement
- derivation of general ethical principles.
Four ethical issues in online privacy/trust:
- The “no surprises” principle
- Ethical dilution
- Multi-stakeholder issues
- Multi-context issues
In engaging with the CREDS community, our goal is to use this position paper as the basis for a moderated multi-stakeholder workshop, with the aim of producing two pieces of output:
- A candidate problem statement for ethical guidance on data handling in the domain of cyber-security research;
- Statements of ethical principles which extend beyond the cyber-security research domain, and provide more general guidance for ethical data handling in the modern, mediated digital environment.