April

Dangerous developments that seem interesting in 2007 described in a paper by Wild A. Crabtree et al (2006) «Supporting Ethnographic Studies of Ubiquitous Computing in the Wild» published in the Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems. In the full paper, there is only a brief annotation about ethics made.

Today it rung alarm bells, because tools are made available but education about tools is made short. You see, a tool can be a weapon if not properly used. 

When we study ethnography we learn about ethics in research. We need to use strick protocols that guaranty access to the field of study, including the conditions under which we are going to collect information, and explicit and informed consent of those under study in the field. But if the tools are made available without requiring awareness of the need for complying with ethics and protocols, they open up huge risks by allowing unware people the use of those tools without complying with mandotory obligations for ethics and protocols!

The «right to use something» (in the case described in the paper ethnographic digital tools), needs also the awareness of the «obligations that allow us to use something» (in the case of the paper, the obligation to inform people that they are collecting all that information about them, in all those places). Rights and obligations are a combo that comes together. We can not use one without the other. 

2022/April/18: text edited for clarity. Photo taken Abril 13, 2022, by Monica Pinheiro. You are free to use it if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).