In a talk hosted by Mozilla, UK-based University of Warwick Profs. Tom Sorell and John Guelke discussed ethics in connection with cybersecurity and privacy, some of the implications of the EU's right to be forgotten and where anonymity should play a role.  

Sorell works for the Interdisciplinary Research Ethics Group (IREG), an organization primarily funded by the EU government, which deals with a variety of science and technological issues, including security ethics—in particular, the security ethics involved with counterterrorism and organized crime. Like privacy, the particulars of counterterrorism and organized crime have different dimensions and meanings in the European context vs. the American viewpoint. In relation to security ethics, the IREG deals with the norms that should govern behavior between a state and an individual, as well as between individuals on a personal level. In Sorell's own words, “We’re interested in the NSA, but we’re also interested in trolling.”

Sorell and Guelke discussed the Surveille (pronounced Survey) Advisory Project (SAS), a free service that brings in human rights lawyers, ethicists and technology assessors to focus on which technology is efficient, cost-effective and acceptable on a human rights level in situations dealing with counterterrorism and organized crime. The SAS has noticed urban security is gaining some traction, the professors said. That is, more and more surveillance is being employed in cities, and often times these cities appear to run in a separate jurisdiction from their nation states, which may be bound by human rights regimes. This creates a disconnect from the human rights protections that may have been agreed to on a national level and what is actually occurring in terms of surveillance and preventative measures.

Yet there is also the claim of legitimacy from cities due to their citizens mandating the new security features and technology being put in place and utilized. It is expected as cities continue to grow and gain importance that the debate on urban security, and what that means for human rights such as privacy, will be brought to the forefront of privacy and security discussions, Sorell and Guelke said. 

IREG also attempts to grapple with privacy concerns as they pertain to the individual, such as with informed consent on a variety of Internet platforms. This has proven to be a rather difficult topic due to the fact that next to no one reads the terms and conditions, and yet those terms and conditions are supposed to inform individuals of all the information they are agreeing to sacrifice for use of the service. IREG wants to “make it more digestible for users” so they can better understand what they are agreeing to give up when they check the “I Agree” box. At the moment, IREG is looking to make the consent more informed than it is, which would improve the situation, even if it is not a complete solution.

Finally, the professors turned to anonymity and the EU's right to be forgotten. European privacy can generally be characterized as the ability to control the information about one’s self. This rather demanding concept of privacy allows for people, through the right to be forgotten, to hide negative truths about themselves from others, an anonymization of past bad deeds, if you will, and essentially allows for image management. There has been a growing critique of the EU's sweeping view of privacy and that has become a divisive issue in the European Parliament.

In dealing with anonymization and, subsequently, privacy, the IREG takes the perspective of “zonal privacy,” where life can be divided into different zones such as home, healthcare and politics, and each of those zones has different privacy needs and regulations. For the purposes of this talk, the focus was on anonymization in politics and cyber-activism. Within the zone of cyber-activism the IREG asks, whether when cyber-activism is conducted anonymously if it is being conducted according to the norms that govern politics? Of course that raises questions on which norms of politics should be adhered to, especially within the various contexts of countries combined with the increasing pressure and reality of globalization.          

In dealing with the anonymity on a political level, an argument was raised during the talk that in liberal jurisdictions the need for anonymity was irrelevant in light of the protections put in place by institutions. A debate then ensued over how effective those so-called institutional protections are, and how does one go about judging if anonymity is necessary. It was agreed by nearly every party in the room that in the case of power imbalances, anonymity was needed to protect activists and individuals. However, being anonymous in one zone does not necessarily guarantee that a person will stay anonymous, due to the abundance of crossover between the zones and technological overlap with information-sharing.

The talk looked at questions like, will anonymity in the political sphere disappear completely in time? When does society decide to make decisions based off of anonymous information and why? How will we navigate the differences between views of privacy globally? Will privacy be turned into a commodity in urban centers that can be capitalized on in rural areas? And with many questions on privacy, no answers currently exist.