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Thinking Ethically: Ethics in Networked Systems Research

Bendert Zevenbergen

The Oxford Internet Institute's Ethics in Networked Systems Research project is developing practical guidelines for computer scientists and engineers to assess the ethical implications and social impact of your work. A preliminary version of this work was commissioned by Google's Measurement Lab project to review ethical and privacy implications of their mobile network experimentation (pdf).

 

Through interdisciplinary workshops around the world, we have been working to extend the scope of this ethics tool in order to be applicable to a wide variety of engineering projects. Philosophers, engineers, and lawyers participated in these workshops and reflected on moral justifications and technical solutions in practical cases, which generated some interesting new insights for the guidelines.

 

The workshop will reflect on some typical moral dilemmas of tech projects, demo practical applications of the guidelines through a few case studies, and discuss the benefits of the iterative moral reflexivity approach for engineering projects. One of the aims of this project is to structure conversations about technology ethics between engineers, users, managers, lawyers, and ethics boards in order to make them more informed and meaningful. Technical researchers and project teams will benefit from applying these guidelines to structure internal project design discussions and to develop a coherent external narrative. 

 

The guidelines are still in draft form and you are invited to contribute critical expert input during the presentation, or via a collaborative document afterwards. This talk is part of a 3-week series where the project’s lead researcher Ben Zevenbergen will present and workshop the ethical guidelines around Europe and the US. Previous input has been gathered at universities and conferences in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Delaware, San Diego, Sydney, Berlin, and Vienna. An up-to-date version of the guidelines will be shared a week before the talk.

Speaker bio

Ben Zevenbergen joined the Oxford Internet Institute to pursue a DPhil on the intersection of privacy law, technology, social science, and the Internet. He runs a side project that aims to establish ethics guidelines for Internet research, as well as working in multidisciplinary teams such as the EU funded Network of Excellence in Internet Science. He has worked on legal, political and policy aspects of the information society for several years. Most recently he was a policy advisor to an MEP in the European Parliament, working on Europe’s Digital Agenda. Previously Ben worked as an ICT/IP lawyer and policy consultant in the Netherlands. Bendert holds a degree in law, specialising in Information Law.

 

 

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