No abstract

Nowadays, mobile users are constantly being connected and increasingly asked to express their personal preferences in the digital world. User preferences deal with simple device settings options, like notification alarms, as well as relevant ethical choices relating to the user behavior, privacy ones included (e.g., concerning the unauthorized disclosure and mining of personal data, as well as the access to restricted resources). All these preferences define the user, they are the building blocks of her digital identity and will be increasingly important given the growing rise of autonomous technologies and their ethical implications. The settings that enable these preferences are often hard to locate and hard to understand, even in popular apps and operating systems. Moreover, they can expose privacy, be employed for profiling or exploited for malicious activities. In this landscape, we devise the introduction of a Personal Preferences Automation Module (PPAM) capable of automatically inferring, applying and enforcing user choices in multiple scenarios ranging from speeding up simple time consuming tasks, to managing sensitive ethical choices. The wide range of sensors and devices that can be found in the mobile domain makes it a privileged context in which to employ the proposed module. In this paper, we present two application scenarios and describe the proposed approach at work on them.

The development and the spread of increasingly autonomous digital technologies in our society pose new ethical challenges beyond data protection and privacy violation. Users are unprotected in their interactions with digital technologies and at the same time autonomous systems are free to occupy the space of decisions that is prerogative of each human being. In this context the multidisciplinary project Exosoul aims at developing a personalized software exoskeleton which mediates actions in the digital world according to the moral preferences of the user. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature, but aiming at reflecting and predicting general moral preferences. Our approach is hybrid, first based on the identification of profiles in a top-down manner, and then on the refinement of profiles by a personalized data-driven approach. In this work we report our initial experiment on building such top-down profiles. We consider the correlations between ethics positions (idealism and relativism) personality traits (honesty/humility, conscientiousness, Machiavellianism and narcissism) and worldview (normativism), and then we use a clustering approach to create ethical profiles predictive of user’s digital behaviors concerning privacy violation, copyright infringements, caution and protection. Data were collected by administering a questionnaire to 317 young individuals. In the paper we discuss two clustering solutions (k = 2 and k = 4) in terms of validity and predictive power of digital behavior.

No abstract

The development and the spread of increasingly autonomous digital technologies in our society pose new ethical challenges beyond data protection and privacy violation. Users are unprotected in their interactions with digital technologies and at the same time autonomous systems are free to occupy the space of decisions that is prerogative of each human being. In this context the multidisciplinary project Exosoul aims at developing a personalized software exoskeleton which mediates actions in the digital world according to the moral preferences of the user. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature, but aiming at reflecting and predicting general moral preferences. Our approach is hybrid, first based on the identification of profiles in a top-down manner, and then on the refinement of profiles by a personalized data-driven approach. In this work we report our initial experiment on building such top-down profiles. We consider the correlations between ethics positions (idealism and relativism) personality traits (honesty/humility, conscientiousness, Machiavellianism and narcissism) and worldview (normativism), and then we use a clustering approach to create ethical profiles predictive of user's digital behaviors concerning privacy violation, copy-right infringements, caution and protection. Data were collected by administering a questionnaire to 317 young individuals. In the paper we discuss two clustering solutions, one data-driven and one model-driven, in terms of validity and predictive power of digital behavior.