Technology innovations often become the commonplace standards of tomorrow. We all end up sleeping in the bed we have made. In hind sight, will we look back and believe we innovated in a responsible manner? I worry about this.
In my podcast earlier this month with IBM Chief Privacy Officer Harriett Pearson, I mentioned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and posed the question “what if we are creating technologies that kind of go in the face of something like this?” In other words, what if systems are designed without the essential characteristics needed to support basic privacy and civil liberties principles?
For example, let’s take Articles 9, 12, 15 and 17 of this Declaration, each of which incorporate an arbitrariness test that serves to protect certain human rights.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 15
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 17
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
In my view, the arbitrariness test cannot be satisfied if any of the identified deprivations rely upon data for which its pedigree cannot be demonstrated. For example, if technologies play a role in “arrest, detention, exile, interference, attacks or deprivation,” they must support disclosure of the source upon which such invasions are predicated.
In thinking further about this, I would call for the following minimum design characteristics in any system that could affect one’s privacy or civil liberties:
- Every data point is associated to its data source
- Every data point is associated to its author
- Every data point is associated to a specific timeframe
- Every data point is associated to a specific location
In addition, such a system should also include mechanisms that assure some degree of accuracy, currency and context.
Responsible technology design is no panacea towards ensuring our human rights. But, if we start thinking about aligning innovation with humanitarian principles, maybe the future will be brighter.
Your views on responsible innovation in the context of human rights resonated profoundly with mine. I had been bothered to no end by the current developments in entity analytics ever since I was aware of the capabilities provided by certain technologies. I had been involved (some 8-9 years ago) in such early technologies and I decided to stay away from developing such "beasts" that tend to put too much power in the hands of hard-to-restrain-people-in-power. I lived in a communist country in my youth and I know the fear of not having any privacy. I hope brilliant people like you will develop such technologies with great respect for human rights. It would be very sad to hear about another case of technology misuse as was the case with the Hollerith punch-card sorting machine...
Posted by: Albert P | March 15, 2006 at 06:40 AM