Since 2014, millions of refugees and migrants have arrived at the borders of Europe. This article argues that, in making their way to safe spaces, refugees rely not only on a physical but increasingly also digital infrastructure of movement. Social media, mobile devices, and similar digitally networked technologies comprise this infrastructure of "digital passages"-sociotechnical spaces of flows in which refugees, smugglers, governments, and corporations interact with each other and with new technologies. At the same time, a digital infrastructure for movement can just as easily be leveraged for surveillance and control. European border policies, in particular, instantiate digital controls over refugee movement and identity. We review the actors, technologies, and policies of movement and control in the EU context and argue that scholars, policymakers, and the tech community alike should pay heed to the ethics of the use of new technologies in refugee and migration flows.
Designing programmable privacy logic frameworks that correspond to social, ethical, and legal norms has been a fundamentally hard problem. Contextual integrity (CI) (Nissenbaum, 2010) offers a model for conceptualizing privacy that is able to bridge technical design with ethical, legal, and policy approaches. While CI is capable of capturing the various components of contextual privacy in theory, it is challenging to discover and formally express these norms in operational terms. In the following, we propose a crowdsourcing method for the automated discovery of contextual norms. To evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach, we conducted an extensive survey on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) with more than 450 participants and 1400 questions. The paper has three main takeaways: First, we demonstrate the ability to generate survey questions corresponding to privacy norms within any context. Second, we show that crowdsourcing enables the discovery of norms from these questions with strong majoritarian consensus among users. Finally, we demonstrate how the norms thus discovered can be encoded into a formal logic to automatically verify their consistency.
In light of the recent US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance scandals, the article reflects on the continued importance of privacy in the information age. Based on a taxonomy of privacy violations provided by Daniel Solove, it takes the reader on an imaginary journey to a world in which privacy has ceased to exist. What does it mean "to have or not to have privacy" in the information age? This essay, part academic, part call for action, explores this question by means of an analogy, focusing on the relationship between citizens and the state. It demonstrates that the invisible presence of the NSA should be a matter of great concern to us. There is no justification for blanket surveillance. The right to security is an illusion.Instead of fighting windmills, we should fight for our right to privacy instead. We need to have privacy; we need it to live and love, to make mistakes, and to grow. We need it as individuals and as a society. And we can have it if we press our legislators to return it to us. It is time to start fighting back.
In the context of the US National Security Agency surveillance scandal, the transatlantic privacy divide has come back to the fore. In the United States, the right to privacy is primarily understood as a right to physical privacy, thus the protection from unwarranted government searches and seizures. In Germany on the other hand, it is also understood as a right to spiritual privacy, thus the right of citizens to develop into autonomous moral agents.The following article will discuss the different constitutional assumptions that underlie American and German attitudes towards privacy, namely privacy as an aspect of liberty or as an aspect of dignity. As data flows defy jurisdictional boundaries, however, policymakers across the Atlantic are faced with a conundrum: how can German and American privacy cultures be reconciled?
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