Skip to main content

Privacy, Trust and Ethical Issues

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

This chapter looks at the issues that social machines raise about privacy, trust and ethics. The chapter begins by surveying the ethical significance of the various roles that are created by social machines, including the individual participant and the designer, and looks at the rights and duties that the occupants of these roles have. Social machines are considered as a particular type of social enterprise or project. The necessity for social machines to generate trust, and how that might impact the wider ethical status of social machines, is also considered. A type of ethical functionalism is described in which the flourishing of the social machine is taken as the basic requirements of ethics considered only from within the machine, not taking into account the outside content. Attitudes towards data and algorithms are considered, and means to render flows of data transparent are discussed, as means of putting social machine participants in control. Such means include privacy indicators, personal data stores and the X-Ray Refine system that explains data flows from a user’s smartphone. The ways in which people use technology to present themselves in certain ways (informational self-determination) are studied, and some experiments with social technologies that could aid informational self-determination are reported. In a final section, the specific and sensitive case of healthcare social machines is surveyed, including looking at areas where data use has a social aspect, such as participatory digital surveillance, quantified patient and social palliative care. Modelling social aspects of institutional procedures in the medical space is also considered, taking the examples of integrated care pathways and data safe havens.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Thanks to Dave Robertson for these unpublished analyses.

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Shadbolt, N., O’Hara, K., De Roure, D., Hall, W. (2019). Privacy, Trust and Ethical Issues. In: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10889-2_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10889-2_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-10888-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-10889-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics