ICT Critical Infrastructures and Society: Introduction to the HCC10 Conference Proceedings

Abstract

For 40 years, the academics and business executives who have attended the Human Choice and Computers international conference series have discussed human choices and social responsibility in relation to information and communication technology (ICT). At this 2012 conference, the focus is on ICT critical infrastructures, and the challenges they pose to governments, businesses and people. Several topics have emerged as relevant in this conference: ICT developments at international and national levels; sustainable and responsible innovation; dilemmas involving ICT, peace and war; and the implications of ICT and social media for citizens' involvement and citizens' rights. What should national computing associations be doing to explore these serious issues? How should the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) itself respond? Responses are needed that are flexible and durable enough to face the challenges of the coming four decades.

Ethical Issues in Ubiquitous Computing—Three Technology Assessment Studies Revisited

“…Instead of digging into the historical details of the development of ethics codes and guidelines, the following analysis will rather take a "helicopter view" and look at the broader discourse documented in the proceedings of the "Human Choice and Computers (HCC)" conference series, IFIP TC9's main conference. The analysis will rely on a recent lexicometric discourse analysis of the HCC proceedings from 1974 to 2012 [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] conducted by E. Lignovskaya [11]. By providing the wider context in which ethical issues in computing have emerged over four decades, the HCC proceedings are an invaluable source of understanding of today's ethical concerns in computing.…”

“…Starting from this perspective, I reviewed the discourse analysis [11] conducted on all ten HCC volumes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] and identified the main ethical issues connected to the topic of autonomy or self-determination. While the discourse analysis had mainly involved quantitative lexicometric methods, yielding histograms of words and of socalled n-grams (such as "working conditions" or "wireless sensor and actor networks"), my interpretation inevitably necessitated some qualitative contextual knowledge and is therefore not free of subjective judgment.…”

“…• informational self-determination [3,5,10] • and biometrics [6] • in health care [7] • and social media [10] Privacy:…”

“…In the following conferences, the privacy discourse continued while integrating new and more specific issues, in particular biometric methods [6], health care (ehealth) [7], and social media [10].…”

“…The aspect of location or positioning is linked to the general discussion about privacy in social networks [10] to the extent that social networking platforms will start tracking their users' locations automatically and in real time [14]. Location privacy is an important special case of privacy because public or private-sector organizations that process location data can combine them into profiles from which not only the activities, but also the contacts of persons can be inferred [14,19].…”