Abstract
This chapter introduces the notion of social machines as a way of conceptualising and formalising the interactions between people and private networked technology for problem-solving. It is argued that formalisation of such ‘social computing’ will generate requirements for information flow within social machines and across their boundaries with the outside world. These requirements provide the basis for a notion of group privacy that is neither derivative from the idea of individual privacy preferences, nor founded in political or moral argument, but instead related to the integrity of the social machine and its capabilities for bottom-up problem-solving. This notion of group privacy depends on a particular technological setup, and is not intended to be a general definition, but it has purchase in the context of pervasive technology and big data which has made the question of group privacy pressing and timely.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Allen, A. L. 2003. Privacy isn’t everything: Accountability as a personal and social good, Alabama Law Review, 54.
Berners-Lee, T. 1999. Weaving the web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the world wide web. New York: HarperCollins.
Bernstein, A., M. Klein, and T.W. Malone. 2012. Programming the global brain. Communications of the ACM 55(5): 41–43.
Boyd, D, and A. Marwick. 2011. Social steganography: Privacy in networked publics. http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/Steganography-ICAVersion.pdf.
Brush, A. J. B., J. Jung, R. Mahajan, and F. Martinez. 2013. Digital neighborhood watch: Investigating the sharing of camera data amongst neighbors. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work, 693–700. New York: ACM Library.
Chan, N.D., and S.A. Shaheen. 2012. Ridesharing in North America: Past, present and future. Transport Reviews 32(1): 93–112.
De Roure, D. 2014. The emerging paradigm of social machines. In Digital enlightenment yearbook 2014: Social networks and social machines, surveillance and empowerment, ed. K. O’Hara, C.M. Nguyen, and P. Haynes, 227–234. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Engesser, S. 2014. Towards a classification of participatory news websites: Comparing heuristic and empirical types. Digital Journalism 2(4): 575–595.
Floridi, L. 2014. Open data, data protection, and group privacy. Philosophy of Technology 27: 1–3.
Hendler, J., and T. Berners-Lee. 2010. From Semantic Web to social machines: A research challenge for AI on the world wide web. Artificial Intelligence 174(2): 156–161.
Hildebrandt, M. 2012. The dawn of a critical transparency right for the profiling era. In Digital enlightenment yearbook 2012, ed. J. Bus, M. Crompton, M. Hildebrandt, and G. Metakides, 41–56. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Jennings, N.R., L. Moreau, D. Nicholson, S. Ramchurn, S. Roberts, T. Rodden, and A. Rogers. 2014. Human-agent collectives. Communications of the ACM 57(12): 80–88.
Kleinberg, J., and P. Raghavan. 2005. Query incentive networks. In Proceedings of the 46 th annual IEEE symposium of Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS’05), 132–141. Pittsburgh.
Kwiatkowska, M., R. Milner and Vladimiro Sassone. 2004. Science for global ubiquitous computing. Bulletin of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science, 82, 325–333, http://eatcs.org/images/bulletin/beatcs82.pdf.
Lintott, C.J., K. Schawinski, A. Slosar, K. Land, S. Bamford, D. Thomas, M. Jordan Raddick, R.C. Nichol, A. Szalay, D. Andreescu, P. Murray, and J. Vandenberg. 2008. Galaxy Zoo: Morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the sloan digital sky survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 389(3): 1179–1189.
Lusthaus, J. 2012. Trust in the world of cybercrime. Global Crime 13(2): 71–94.
MacKinnon, C.A. 1989. Toward a feminist theory of the state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Meadows, M. 2013. Putting the citizen back into journalism. Journalism 14(1): 43–60.
Mill, J. Stuart. 1859. On liberty. London: John W. Parker & Son.
Morrow, N., N. Mock, A. Papendieck, and N. Kocmich. 2011. Independent eEvaluation of the Ushahidi Haiti project, Development Information Systems International, http://ggs684.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/60819963/1282.pdf.
O’Hara, K. 2011. Transparent government, not transparent citizens: A report for the cCabinet office, London: Cabinet Office, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-transparency-and-privacy-review.
O’Hara, K. 2012. Trust in social machines: The challenges. In Proceedings of the AISB/IACAP world congress 2012: Social computing, social cognition, social networks and multiagent systems (SOCIAL TURN/SNAMAS), http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/339703/.
O’Hara, K., N.S. Contractor, W. Hall, J.A. Hendler, and N. Shadbolt. 2013. Web science: Understanding the emergence of macro-level features on the world wide web. Foundations and Trends in Web Science 4(2/3): 103–267.
O’Hara, K., M.H.C. Nguyen, and P. Haynes. 2014. Introduction. In Digital enlightenment yearbook 2014: Social networks and social achines, surveillance and empowerment, ed. K. O’Hara, M.H.C. Nguyen, and P. Haynes, 3–21. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Okolloh, O. 2009. Ushahidi, or “testimony”: Web 2.0 tools for crowdsourcing crisis information. Participatory Learning and Action 59(1): 65–70.
Pickard, G., Iyad Rahwan, Wei Pan, Manuel Cebrian, Riley Crane, Anmol Madan and Alex Pentland. 2010. Time critical social mobilization: The DARPA network challenge winning strategy, arXiv.org 1008.3172v1, http://hd.media.mit.edu/tech-reports/TR-660.pdf.
Robertson, D., and F. Giunchiglia. 2013. Programming the social computer. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 371(1987).
Robertson, D., L. Moreau, D. Murray-Rust, and K. O’Hara. 2014. An open system for social computation. In Digital enlightenment yearbook 2014: Social networks and social machines, surveillance and empowerment, ed. K. O’Hara, M.H.C. Nguyen, and P. Haynes, 235–252. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Rosenblum, N.L. 2000. Membership and morals: The personal uses of pluralism in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rössler, B. 2005. The value of privacy. Cambridge: Policy Press.
Schoeman, F.D. 1984. Privacy: Philosophical dimensions of the literature. In Philosophical dimensions of privacy: An anthology, ed. F.D. FSchoeman, 1–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schoeman, F.D. 1992. Privacy and social freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seiler, M. J., A. J. Collins, and N. H. Fefferman. 2011. Strategic default in the context of a social network: An epidemiological approach, Research Institute for Housing America, http://www.housingamerica.org/RIHA/RIHA/Publications/78456_10923_Research_RIHA_Default_Report.pdf.
Shadbolt, N., D. Smith, E. Simperl, M. Van Kleek, Y. Yang, and W. Hall. 2013. Towards a classification framework for social machines. In Proceedings of SOCM2013: The theory and practice of social machines, Rio, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/350513/.
Smith, A. 1994. An enquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, 2 volumes, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Solove, D.J. 2006. A taxonomy of privacy. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154(3): 477–560.
Van Kleek, M., D. Smith, W. Hall, and N. Shadbolt. 2013. “The crowd keeps me in shape”: Social psychology and the present and future of health social machines. In Proceedings of SOCM2013: The theory and practice of social machines, Rio, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/350511/.
Van Kleek, M., D. Murray-Rust, A. Guy, D. Smith, and N. Shadbolt. 2015. Self curation, social partitioning, escaping from prejudice and harassment: The many dimensions of lying online. In 2015 ACM web science conference, Oxford.
von Ahn, L., M. Blum, N.J. Hopper, and J. Langford. 2003. CAPTCHA: Using hard AI problems for security. In Advances in cryptology: EUROCRYPT 2003, ed. E. Biham, 294–311. Berlin: Springer.
von Ahn, L., B. Maurer, C. McMillen, D. Abraham, and M. Blum. 2008. reCAPTCHA: Human-based character recognition via web security measures. Science 321: 1465–1468.
Walker, P. 2013. Boston bombing identification attempts on social media end in farce. The Guardian, 19th April, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/boston-bombing-suspects-reddit-social-media.
Zinnbauer, D. 2014. Crowd-sourcing corruption: What petrified forests, street music, bath towels and the Taxman can tell us about the prospects for the future, Social Science Research Network, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2508606.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the EPSRC project SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, ref EP/J017728/1.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Hara, K., Robertson, D. (2017). Social Machines as an Approach to Group Privacy. In: Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. (eds) Group Privacy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 126. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46608-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46608-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46606-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46608-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)