Researchers hunt for ethical technologies

In a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls in technology before they become a problem, a new research project will identify the Information and Communications technologies (ICTs) that are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years.

The two-year study called Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA), coordinated by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) aims to help researchers identify new technologies that could become as famous as Facebook and Twitter and enable them to devise a strategy for dealing with the unforeseen drawbacks that these emerging technologies bring along.

ICTs such as online banking have been widely accepted since few years but they prompted “cyber crimes”, phishing, financial account theft and so on. Experts now fear the increasing availability of sensitive personal data online through social networking websites could be misappropriated for identity theft or other fraudulent purposes such as using these sites to vet prospective employees.

The ETICA team will identify emerging technologies and assess how they are likely to be used. Researchers will then list the ethical issues that are likely to arise from each possible application and devise a method to grade and rank them. Following this, they will create a list of the top five issues they consider to have the highest priority and will make recommendations to policy makers based on their findings.

They will also investigate governance models to see which are most likely to successfully address the ethical issues identified in the project.

Dr Bernd Stahl, the project coordinator said: “This project will explore emerging technologies as well as likely ethical issues and provide scientifically based recommendations for policy makers on how to address issues of ICT ethics.

While social network sites are easily identified as areas of future ethical problems, there are other more difficult ICTs such as quantum computing or ubiquitous sensor networks.

“Quantum computers and cloud computing could have serious implications on computer security as they can be used for novel types of encryption. Ubiquitous sensor networks can conceivably raise new challenges to privacy and develop new capacities of surveillance.”

Twelve partners across Europe are involved in the project, worth €1m (£880,000), partly funded by money from the EU’s Framework 7 Programme.