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 ).

December

“Failure is instrumental in success. We need to fail to learn. It’s only through exploring and figuring out the territory, that the fog starts to clear.” Douglas McMaster, owner of Silo restaurant, thoughts about the need to change existing views, implementing zero-waste designed systems, from farm to fork (and beyond), changing paradigms and inspiring future ethical behaviours. in «A Failure of Imagination», directed by Matt Hopkins. 

Photo of tapestry (76 x 92 cm) by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

November

 

«Data protection in EU: Comparative Study of National Reports» "a document aimed to produce a panoramic vision of the legal and ethical framework both at the national and EU level, complementing PANELFIT Guidelines. (...) The present study includes a comparative analysis of data protection in the 27 countries of the European Union. Offering stakeholders and end users a synthetic and simplified version. The national reports produced by our network of experts, so far, are reproduced as well." See legal data and comments for data protection in Portugal. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

August

More (digital) data about consumers / citizens should be synonym with increased ethical use behaviours, but is it? Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

May

“The information society is like a tree that has been growing its far-reaching branches much more widely, hastily, and chaotically than its conceptual, ethical, and cultural roots. (…) The risk is that, like a tree with week roots, further and healthier growth at the top might be impaired by a fragile foundation at the bottom.” Luciano Floridi (2010). Information: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

silence

"Experience doesn't come raw, but it comes in real time, in wildness, and not in anyone s direct control. Responding to experience means letting generalization and specificity be in dialectic in our writings and in our biographies. And this in turn means resistance – to pressures for conformity and towards the uniform voice (although there are sometimes ethical reasons for presenting a united front )." Star, S. L., Bowker, G., (2007). Enacting silence: Residual categories as a challenge for ethics, information systems, and communication. Ethics and Information Technology, vol.9, pp. 273-280. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

ethics

Incorporate and adapt for research protocol: ethical issues related with participants. See Amy Bruckman (2002) Ethical Guidelines for Research Online, available online.