Ethics of Digital Methods and Technologies

Two new articles were published in the last months, one is an English language contribution on the same set of topics a previous article and is titled “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers and Shared Experience.” The article resulted from a presentation on an international Pragmatism conference in Warsaw and was published in the Polish philosophy journal Ruch Filozoficzny. The abstract reads like this:

This article explores what John Dewey’s political philosophy can offer in regard to the current crisis in digital democracy. It focuses on two digital mechanisms, the “filter bubble” and the “echo chamber”. While there is a prominent, Dewey-inspired debate on “digital publics” in the literature, a reconstruction of the Deweyan concepts of the public and of shared experience shows that it does not adequately reflect the aspect of situated and embodied experience. Based on this, it is shown that digital media offerings must also be rooted in local contexts of experience in order to answer the challenge of those two problematic mechanisms.

The article was published as open access here: Weydner-Volkmann, Sebastian (2023) “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers and Shared Experience.” In: Ruch Filozoficzny 79 (4): 29–47. DOI: 10.12775/RF.2022.029.

In another article, I reviewed some of my research conducted in the TRESSPASS project on Open Source Intelligence in the context of EU border control. The abstract reads like this:

This article explores the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques as part of data-driven border checks in the EU. While the idea to group travelers into risk categories in order to differentiate the intensity of border checks has been criticized for its likely impact on privacy and other fundamental rights, the exclusive use of “open,” “public” data was proposed as an alternative that mitigates these issues. However, OSINT remains a rather vague term, as it is unclear what constitutes “open” or “public” data, how the use of such techniques would contribute to the production of security, and whether its use actually mitigates most ethical issues. The goal of this article is to contribute toward a situated answer to these questions. It will provide groundwork by clarifying what OSINT practices could entail in the context of the European border checks regime and by developing an ethical perspective on these practices. I will show that the impact depends not so much on the public availability of the analyzed data, but on the specifics of the implementation of OSINT techniques. Thus, certain uses of OSINT continue to raise severe privacy and fundamental rights issues.

This article, too, was published as open access and can be found here: Weydner-Volkmann, Sebastian (2023): “Using Open, Public Data for Security Provision: Ethical Perspectives on Risk-Based Border Checks in the EU.” In: European Journal for Security Research, June. DOI: 10.1007/s41125-023-00092-4.