Table Of ContentData Ethics of Power
Dedicated to Clara, Francesco, Tina, Bo and my dear friend
Gry who showed me what ethics is in practice in each of their
uniquely human ways.
Dedicato a Clara, Francesco, Tina, Bo e Gry che mi hanno
mostrato ognuno a loro modo cosa sia l´etica nella vita
quatodiana.
Data Ethics of Power
A Human Approach in the Big Data and AI Era
Gry Hasselbalch
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Gry Hasselbalch 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Published by
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Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
William Pratt House
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Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021947983
This book is available electronically in the
Political Science and Public Policy subject collection
http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781802203110
ISBN 978 1 80220 310 3 (cased)
ISBN 978 1 80220 311 0 (eBook)
EEP BoX
Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction to Data Ethics of Power 1
1 Big Data Socio-Technical Infrastructures (BDSTIs) 14
2 Sociotechnical change and data ethical governance 38
3 Artificial Intelligence Socio-Technical Infrastructures (AISTIs) 63
4 Data interests and data cultures 89
5 What is data ethics? 129
6 Conclusion to Data Ethics of Power 159
Bibliography 169
Index 189
v
Preface
Many years ago, in the early 2000s, I worked with children and young peo-
ple’s use of new online technologies. Back then, the average adult population
mainly knew the internet as a communications platform for emails, basic
search and news. Younger generations, on the other hand, were quickly
adopting the internet’s opportunities for self-expression and social networking
as a digital extension of their everyday life. It was an online world for youth
perceived by an adult generation as inaccessible, incomprehensible and secret.
These were also the early years of the popularisation of an online privacy
movement. Although it had existed in technical activist communities since
the introduction of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the privacy movement
was increasingly also sieving into public awareness. Online privacy was
considered a form of power that we could campaign for and tell citizens to
demand by using privacy-enhancing technologies to protect ourselves against
state and commercial tracking and surveillance. At one point I realised though
that educating and raising awareness among the users of the internet was
not enough. I became particularly concerned that youth’s initial experience
of freedom away from adults’ prying eyes was actually just another form of
control by other more invisible powerful actors, such as social media tech
giants. What concerned me the most was these actors’ presence everywhere
– at our events and meetings, in public consultations, in policy initiatives. It
was as if their business design and model for the evolution of the Internet was
the only formula possible. Therefore, I started focusing on alternatives to the
very design and business models of these services inspired by the early critical
voices in the field.
All along, civil society actors had worked to have human rights issues
included on the official internet governance agenda in processes such as
the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the UN Internet
Governance Fora (IGF). However, it was not until 2013 that the United Nations
General Assembly affirmed that the same rights that people have offline must
also be protected online (UN, 2013). Even then, in the more general business
and public discourse, human rights online did not take a proper foothold.
Human rights considerations, such as concerns regarding our rights to privacy
and data protection, were often in public discourse described as obstacles to
digital innovation, as old social norms that were preventing an unavoidable
digital evolution of society. It was obvious that the very business and tech-
vi
Preface vii
nology culture of the internet’s development was preventing a more ethically
reflective and constructive debate. In 2014, I therefore established the Global
Privacy as Innovation Network at the UN Internet Governance Forum, bring-
ing together industry, human rights advocates and technology entrepreneurs to
explore privacy as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.
At that time, data ethics was still not a layman’s term and the ethical impli-
cations of data technology and business were addressed in public debate – if
addressed at all – in terms of privacy implications only. As such, it was still
a great struggle for the lone privacy activist to walk into a public debate on
social media and the digitalisation of society. Human rights issues of online
business were considered an activist topic separate from the debates on big
data innovation and disruption that were shaping online business development.
In 2015, I left the Danish Media Council where I had worked for 10 years
in a national EU Awareness Centre on youth’s use of the internet and new
technologies. Together with the former journalist Pernille Tranberg, I started
exploring a growing movement among technology designers and emerging
companies developing and promoting alternative data design and business
models based on the preservation of privacy. We established the thinktank
DataEthics together with two other women. At first it was like fighting with
the most popular kid in school; we were the outsiders, the activists, who did
not understand the awesomeness of this reckless kid and his shiny new tools.
However, public discourse and awareness was also changing; in particular, the
negotiations of the European General Data Protection Reform were increas-
ingly addressed in public debate. Alongside a growing awareness and attention
to the ethics of digital technology, the thinkdotank DataEthics became increas-
ingly involved in the public debate as well as in business and the policy debate.
These years of immersion in the field have been integral to my under-
standing of the history and power dynamics that I explore in this book. I have
seen a rising awareness of the role of the internet in society that increasingly
included a view on risks and challenges beyond mere technical and functional
issues. And I have seen how a focus on online privacy risks transformed into
a more generally accepted awareness of data ethical implications and issues
in the general public – violations of human dignity, the exposed vulnerable
groups in society, discrimination and challenges to democracy and democratic
institutions. This is also where I discovered a pattern of cultural powers; the
distribution of power in culturally embedded socio-technical data systems, and
not least the interests invested in the very term data ethics as an expression of
power dynamics.
Acknowledgements
Many people and communities have been vital to this book, and I want to
thank them all – the privacy and human rights advocates, the whistle blowers
and investigative journalists, the open-minded policymakers, the brilliant
scholars. Specifically, I wish to sincerely thank the people with whom I have
had the most empowering collaborations and exchange of ideas over the years:
Francesco Lapenta, Pernille Tranberg, Birgitte Kofod Olsen, Rikke Frank
Jørgensen and Carolina Aguerre. A special thanks to Jens-Erik Mai for the
invaluable reading of and comments on several drafts of what turned into this
book.
Thank you to Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Simone van der Hof and Safiya
Umoja Noble for their insightful reading and feedback and to the research
group ‘Surveillance, Information Ethics and Privacy’ at the University of
Copenhagen – in specific Laura Skouvig, Karen Søilen and Sille Obelitz Søe.
I also would like to extend my gratitude and appreciation to the people behind
the IEEE Ethically Aligned Design Initiative who put ethics into action; the
human rights scholars and advocates of the global internet governance com-
munity who paved the way – in particular, Meryem Marzouki and Marianne
Franklin; the members of the Global Privacy and Innovation Network who all
very early could see privacy as something other than an obstacle; the inspir-
ing Data Pollution & Power group, and in specific Aimee van Wynsberghe,
at University of Bonn’s Sustainable AI Lab; Gianluca Misuraca of the
InTouchAI.eu - International Outreach for a Human-Centric Approach to
AI initiative; the trustworthy AI civil society movement – in particular Mark
Surman and Martin Tisne; Nathalie Smuha and the EU High-Level Expert
Group on AI who coined the term ‘Trustworthy AI’ and revitalised the
human-centric approach.
I am forever thankful for the support of close friends: My guardian spirit
Britt, Carolina, Signe, Stine, Rikke, Marie, Maria, Camse. Grateful for family
love now, then, here and beyond: Francesco & Clara, Bo, Ask, Sanne (and the
three), Virginia & Francesco, Maurizio, Tina & Mario, nonina, Mino, Luca &
Lucia (and the Rome family), Pino & Franca (and the Bergamo family), Nicola
& Franca, Virginio, Rocco, Vincenzo, Gry & Jacub (and the Sletten family),
farmor & farfar, mormor & morfar, Susie, mor.
viii
Introduction to Data Ethics of Power
‘Imagine a piece of music which expresses love. It is not love for any particular
person. Another piece of music will express another love. Here we have two distinct
emotional atmospheres, two different fragrances, and in both cases the quality of love
will depend upon its essence and not upon its object. Nevertheless, it is hard to con-
ceive a love which is, so to speak, at work, and yet applies to nothing.’
Henri Bergson, 1932
Why do we need to talk about data ethics? The relation between humans and
their data and information has always involved social and ethical dilemmas,
and it is no novelty that data systems and registers have persistently through-
out history reinforced power dynamics in society and also created new ones.
Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 21st century the very shape of our con-
temporary data systems, their ethical implications and power complexes have
rapidly transformed with the advancement of new digital technologies and data,
which is why I, in this book, propose that we also need a differently shaped
data ethics. A recent and new development is the transformation of all things
into data as an effortless, costless and seamless extra layer of life and society.
Data at the time of writing no longer just captures politics, the economy,
culture and lives – data is their extension. It is ingrained in society in multiple
forms in increasingly complex digital systems which have been developed to
contain and make sense of large amounts of data and to act on that knowledge.
These digital data systems form a key component of decision-making in poli-
tics, culture and industries, and also on life trajectories, and consequently, they
are also the centre of power negotiations between different interests. As such,
this new shape of power should be at the core of any ethical concern with data
systems – and at the heart of data ethics.
With this book, I want to find a common ground for debates on the develop-
ment and status of big data and AI sociotechnical environments by spelling out
a ‘human approach’, which I refer to as a ‘data ethics of power’. A data ethics
of power is concerned with making visible the power relations embedded
in big data and AI sociotechnical infrastructures in order to point to design,
business, policy, social and cultural processes that support a human-centric
distribution of power. But what does this actually mean? Imagine an AI robot
that sieves through pictures containing predominantly white faces deciding
what human ‘beauty’ means. Ponder on an online search system that learns
from news articles to recognise words such as ‘nanny’ and ‘receptionist’ as
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