Ethics & Tracking Via Technology – Getting Ahead of the Game
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
! ! Ethics & Tracking via Technology – ! Getting Ahead of the Game. Moira A Gunn1 University of San Francisco ! Paul Lorton, Jr. University of San Francisco !Summary The variety of modes and manners in which technology can assist our evaluation efforts is expanding very rapidly and working on insinuating devices into every nook and cranny of our being. Potentially this is a great boon to expanding the scope and enhancing the precision of our data generation and subsequent insight into the dimensions we seek to assess. On the other hand, should we be deploying these gadgets into what may be private and intrusive areas of our evaluatees lives? Is what we can do crossing the line which governs what we ought to do? Looking at, especially, the biometric tracking sensors becoming available, their capabilities and vulnerabilities, we address the disclosure and ethical concerns building on the increasing body of guidelines and law building around the existing GPS tracking and the use of RFID tags to monitor behavior in evaluative efforts.! !Introduction Trackable sensors now becoming available for monitoring the behavior of participants in evaluations of all sorts where direct data can replace self-reporting raise a variety of issues which need to be explicitly addressed in thinking about integrating technology into evaluation. Many of these issues increasingly involve the ethical, even legal, concerns the employment such devices can raise. ! Some of these trackable sensors include the existing and increasingly employed GPS capability and RFID tags both passive and active. In the biometric realm, tracking includes the ability to monitor physical activity reJlections such as pedometers, heart, blood pressure & oxygen, temperature monitors. At the most otherworldly level, tracking through facial recognition, eye movement and other reJinements in video surveillance adds considerable potential for both great insight and worrying intrusion into our evaluated behavior. (A recent blog discussion concerning the “Watchful Museum” elicited the comment, “Sorry to say this, but for me this is way past the 1 The Authors may be reached at the following address: Moira A Gunn e-mail: [email protected] Paul Lorton, Jr e-mail: [email protected] University of San Francisco Phone: 415/422-6185 School of Management Fax: 415/422-2502 San Francisco, CA 94117-1045 Ethics & Tracking via Technology –! Getting Ahead of the Game. acceptable line of creepiness.” (see Meritt, 2013))! As is epidemic in the development of computer products in this fast moving digital age, security is the last thing which comes up in the product development process – except for the ethical concerns about the deployment of the technology. Getting the telephone to work; getting it deployed in a critical mass - these were the Jirst and most important concerns. How conversations were secured and the legal/ethical issues in the use of the telephone came much later and continue to be reJined today even as the device evolves to be more capable and less secure.! GPS tracking has been available for a while and has begun to develop a body of procedural and legal guidelines and constraints. With GPS tracking, federal and various state laws as well as common law suggestion that individuals have deJined rights to privacy and protection from unreasonable intrusion into their non-public lives. From the court and statutory consideration of the appropriate use of GPS, guidelines are continuing to develop about the role of informed consent and the limits of the monitoring effort.! There is another area of concern with all tracking technologies and that is protection of the data while it is collected and after that collection. The technology employed in trackable data gathering is, by its “wireless” nature, vulnerable to interception at collection and breaching while stored. ! In addition to the constantly evolving general public awareness of and response to vectors of intrusion technological advances can make, the AEA’s guidelines for practice make their own statement about this matter especially those from Principal D – “Respect for People. “! We learn much from our past practices and this experience, if we choose to apply it guided by the AEA’s precepts, can insure that we positively integrate this ever-evolving technology into our evaluation with care and sensitivity to both the improvement and danger it brings to evaluation.! The State of Technology! The power of the devices we carry around with us, phones, tablets, watches, and various specialized sensors, is incredible and will become even more so as time passes. “Moore’s Law2” compels us to dwarf today’s power with newer, more incredible and intrusive devices. Some of what we can monitor today includes distance traveled, altitude, longitude, latitude, acceleration, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, weather, and so on with an ability to record and save a gargantuan amount of digitally recorded information from these sensors.! To understand the present and future impact of technology on our lives and work, two images/concepts are most enlightening: Moore’s Law and the Internet of Things.! !Moore’s Law As more of a challenge than a law, it continues to be realized because of clever people. Initially, in his 1965 paper, Moore’s observation was that the number of components one could place in a single integrated circuit seemed to double every year so he predicted that the numbers of components on a chip in 10 years would be about 65,000 (actually 216). This was an observation based on the Jirst 7 years of the integrated circuit efforts. With further adjustments, the rate seems to have stabilized at doubling about every 2 years. The result of this fact/law/challenge is that now integrated circuits about the size of a postage stamp are produced with 4 billion devices – an almost 2 Moore, Gordon E. “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.” Electronics, 38, #8, April 19, 1965 AEA ITE TIG page !2 Ethics & Tracking via Technology –! Getting Ahead of the Game. unbelievable amount of digital manipulation power - for nominal cost.! The kind of progress predicted by Moore goes on in the back rooms of enterprises in the silicon industry regardless of what’s happening out front. ! The smaller, faster, cheaper momentum continues producing devices with components we can’t even see, measured in scales and quantities which we can articulate but may not really fathom: 14 nanometer components producing capacities ordinarily of several terabytes with multi billions !of transistors on a postage stamp. We will see below some of the consequences of this activity. Internet of Things! The industry charged with making Moore’s Law a fact has now compelled us to think harder on how to use all that decision making power and has given rise to the Internet of Things (IoT). Rather than focusing on computing devices communicating with their human overloads, the focus shifts to their communicating with each other. At the back of this development is an idea that the best entity to process the tremendous amount of data a computing device can generate each second !is another computing device. Now the challenge is what “thing” to connect in the IoT. Whether we know what the things are or not, there are and will be lots if them and soon. Cisco estimates the IoT will consist of 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020. For another view, ! Siemens Pictures of the Future3 Oct, 2014 states According to the business consultancy Jirm Gartner, approximately 26 billion objects will be linked together in the Internet of Things by 2020. If you add in laptops, PCs, and smartphones, which will number around seven billion by 2020, Gartner arrives at 33 billion objects. The market research and consulting Jirm International Data Corporation (IDC) foresees almost the same number. It estimates that 32 billion objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020, and that these will produce ten percent of all the data generated worldwide. A recent study by MIT Technology Review anticipates 28 billion Internet-connected things. No matter whether it's 28, 32, or 33 billion – as the number of networked devices and sensors increases, they will create an ever-growing, unprecedented Jlow of data. Large quantities of information will have to be collected, analyzed, and stored (Rohling, 2014)! !New Horizons for Integrating Technology into Evaluation Technology’s gift to evaluation through Moore’s Law and the Internet of Things is that what we want to do we will be able to do and at lower and lower cost. As we can come up with an idea, it can be implemented and these ideas can include continuous monitoring everywhere and for !anything. A Few Quick Examples! As the quantities and variety of future devices are limitless so are the possible examples. To lend a Jlavor to this limitless future, let us look at a few examples.! !Wearables Wearable computing has arrived in a variety of ways limited only by what consumers will 3 Rohling, Gitta “Facts and Forecasts: Billions of Things, Trillions of Dollars” Siemens Pictures of the Future Oct, 2014 (http://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-future/digitalization-and- software/internet-of-things-facts-and-forecasts.html) AEA ITE TIG page !3 Ethics & Tracking via Technology –! Getting Ahead of the Game. support. There are bracelets, watches, glasses, fabric, shoes, gloves, an almost inJinite variety of items with an almost limitless variety of functions.! A couple of the more intriguing items include a couple of designs by the Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde. One is a fabric (dress) that reJlects the emotional level of the wearer:! INTIMACY is a high-tech fashion project exploring the relation between intimacy and technology. Its high-tech garments entitled 'Intimacy White' and 'Intimacy Black' are made out of opaque smart e-foils that become increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people.