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Is it Research or is it Spying? Thinking-Through Ethics in Big Data AI and Other Knowledge Sciences

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Abstract

“How to be a knowledge scientist after the Snowden revelations?” is a question we all have to ask as it becomes clear that our work and our students could be involved in the building of an unprecedented surveillance society. In this essay, we argue that this affects all the knowledge sciences such as AI, computational linguistics and the digital humanities. Asking the question calls for dialogue within and across the disciplines. In this article, we will position ourselves with respect to typical stances towards the relationship between (computer) technology and its uses in a surveillance society, and we will look at what we can learn from other fields. We will propose ways of addressing the question in teaching and in research, and conclude with a call to action.

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Notes

  1. This essay comes out of a working group that organized around this question at a Dagstuhl Seminar in July 2014 on Computational Humanities. We thank Chris Biemann, Joachim Scharloth, and Claire Warwick for the inspiring discussions.

  2. http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter.

  3. This point was explored e.g. in the Security and Privacy in a Post-Snowden World November 2014 Symposium at KU Leuven (http://eng.kuleuven.be/evenementen/arenbergsymposium-2014).

  4. http://theguardian.com.

  5. http://spiegel.de.

  6. http://washingtonpost.com.

  7. http://firstlook.org/theintercept/.

  8. See [1] for a searchable archive and [10, 29] for Greenwald’s and Poitras’ documentations.

  9. The Five Eyes are the UK, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand; five Anglophone countries that have a history of collaborating on intelligence gathering.

  10. http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles.

  11. For documentation, see http://epic.org or http://europe-v-facebook.org.

  12. [19], http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.edu/.

  13. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/01/governments-hacking-techniques-surveillance.

  14. http://www.wassenaar.org/controllists/.

  15. http://bds.sagepub.com/.

  16. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/software-studies.

  17. We can also think of “thinking-through” as a playful etymology of dia (between/through) and logos (thought).

  18. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files.

  19. http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~bettina.berendt/teaching/2014-15-1stsemester/kaw/.

  20. http://www.oecd.org/sti/ieconomy/oecdguidelinesontheprotectionofprivacyandtransborderflowsofpersonaldata.htm.

  21. http://privacert.com.

  22. http://www.scribd.com/doc/188094600/CSEC-Presentation.

  23. http://www.i-r-i-e.net/issue14.htm.

  24. An example is the Guardian’s and Observer’s style guide, which does however use “race”, judging by the example as referring to either ethnicity or nationality: http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-r.

  25. See for example the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (2006). http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/.

  26. https://uima.apache.org/.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Flemish Agency for Innovation through Science and Technology (IWT), the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen (FWO), the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support through the projects SPION (Grant Number 100048), Data Mining for Privacy in Social Networks (Grant Number G068611N), the early career research group eTRAP (No. 01UG1409), and the NovelTM project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Bettina Berendt

  2. Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Marco Büchler

  3. Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Geoffrey Rockwell

Authors
  1. Bettina Berendt
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  2. Marco Büchler
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  3. Geoffrey Rockwell
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Correspondence to Bettina Berendt.

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Berendt, B., Büchler, M. & Rockwell, G. Is it Research or is it Spying? Thinking-Through Ethics in Big Data AI and Other Knowledge Sciences. Künstl Intell 29, 223–232 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-015-0355-2

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