AI & Data Ethics

Privacy and Surveillance

21 February 2022
Lecture 7
 AI and Data Ethics
Privacy and Surveillance
Page 2
Guiding questions for this lecture

• What is privacy?
• Why is it worth protecting?
• Who and how can your privacy be
invaded?
• How do new technologies such as
facial recognition affect your privacy?
1 What is privacy?
What does privacy mean
to you?
Discussion What does privacy mean to you?
3 minutes Recall examples of someone
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intruding on your privacy
 Privacy can
mean different
things to
different people
– Survey
Distinguishing between privacy

As a philosophical concept As a legal right

• What privacy is? • Draws from the philosophical concept
• Why is it worth protecting? • Focuses what situations of privacy will
• What interests it does or should be afforded legal protection?
protect?
• What constitutes an intrusion of
privacy?
Privacy As A Philosophical Concept
As a philosophical concept, privacy suffers from
lack of clear definition

• Privacy is “difficult to define because it is

exasperatingly vague and evanescent.” Legal
scholar Arthur Miller
• “the concept of privacy is infected with
pernicious ambiguities.” Professor Hyman Gross
• “[a]ttempts to define the concept of ‘privacy’
have generally not met with any success.”
Political scientist Colin Bennett
What is the problem if we
don’t have clear definition?

• Difficult to articulate why privacy problems

are harmful
• Difficult to articulate what precisely law or
policy must do to solve these problems
• Competing interest can easily overtake over
privacy protection
• Free speech
• Efficient consumer transactions
• National security
Different approaches
to define
• Unitary theories of privacy
• Seek to identify a meaningful conceptual
core—that is, “a common set of necessary
and sufficient elements that single out
privacy as unique from other conceptions.”
• Pluralistic accounts of privacy interests
• Seeks to identify “cluster[s] of problems” or
privacy types that share family resemblances
• Two examples
• Koops et al. ‘Typology of Privacy’
• Solove and Citron’s ‘Typology of Privacy
Harms’
Koops et al.
 Discuss what these nine types of
Discussion privacy mean? Try to identify
4 minutes violations/intrusions for each type
of privacy
Typology of privacy
• Bodily privacy
• Protects persons (as physical entities) against being touched,
harmed, detained, or taken away against their will
• Violation - physically touching the body without permission,
compulsory provision of samples of body fluids and body tissue
• Spatial privacy
• The privacy of private space, such as home, premises & vehicles
• Violation: the peeping tom invading the privacy of two people’s
intimate life by looking through the bedroom window
• Communicational privacy
• Freedom to communicate without interception & routine monitoring
• Violation: intercepting personal communications (e.g. opening or
reading mail), eavesdropping
Cont.
• Proprietary privacy
• A person’s interest in using property as a means to shield activity,
facts, things, or information from the view of others
• Violation: Search of your purses or computer by police
• Intellectual privacy
• The integrity of our intellectual activities, mind and thought
• Violation: High vol noises from a neighbor or constant surveillance of
a person’s actions
• Decisional privacy
• A protection against state intrusions into citizens’ right to make
intimate decisions regarding their lives, e.g. choices about same-sex
marriage or assisted suicide
• Violation: Forced marriage or a government prohibiting the use of
contraceptives or abortions or Chinese’ one family one child policy
Cont.
• Associational privacy
• Pertains to groups & their internal relationships of association, e.g., a
person’s interest to have her membership in groups remain private
• Violation: A government forcing political, religious to reveal identity of
their members or a friend sharing personal matters on TV
• Behavioral privacy
• The privacy interests a person has while conducting publicly visible
activities
• Violation: TV channel broadcasting a person trying to jump from a bridge
• Information privacy
• The interest in preventing information about one-self to be collected and
in controlling such information that others have legitimate access to
• Violation: Collection of your personal data without consent
 Mapping of possible privacy breaches
into the above nine categories
1. Someone sneaking into your unlocked computer or smart phone
2. Police taking biological sample (hair or saliva) forcefully
3. An adopted child denied to know his biological parents

Mapping 4. Someone installing a software on your mobile that allows the

person to listen to your calls

exercise
5. An app collecting your location data without your consent
6. Someone revealing your membership in a political party at
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password: 6492 9619 7. Reporters deceitfully gain entry to a person’s home and secretly
photograph and record him
8. Prohibition on reassignment surgery for transsexual people
9. New X-ray devices that can see through people’s clothing,
amounting to what some call a “virtual strip-search”
10. Someone tracking your location all the time
11. Smart TV recording conversations in your home
Privacy As A Legal Right
What is a • The power, granted by the government to persons,
to allow or disallow others from taking certain
actions, through legal force.
legal right?
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
1948

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary

interference with his privacy, family,
home or correspondence, nor to
attacks upon his honour and
reputation. Everyone has the right to
the protection of the law against such
interference or attacks.
 European
Article 8: Right to respect for private and family life
Convention on
Human Rights 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and
family life, his home and his correspondence.
(ECHR)
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with
1950 the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with
the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the
interests of national security, public safety or the economic
well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or
crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the
protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
 Article 8: Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the
protection of personal data
concerning him or her.

EU Charter of 2. Such data must be processed fairly for

specified purposes and on the basis of
Fundamental the consent of the person concerned
or some other legitimate basis laid

Rights down by law. Everyone has the right of

access to data which has been
collected concerning him or her, and
2000 the right to have it rectified.

3. Compliance with these rules shall be

subject to control by an independent
authority.
Treaty on the Functioning of the
European Union 2012
Article 16

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of

personal data concerning them.

2. The European Parliament and the Council,

acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative
procedure, shall lay down the rules relating to the
protection of individuals with regard to the
processing of personal data by Union institutions,
bodies, offices and agencies, and by the Member
States when carrying out activities which fall
within the scope of Union law, and the rules
relating to the free movement of such data.
Compliance with these rules shall be subject to
the control of independent authorities..
 US Constitution

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their

persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but
upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or
things to be seized
 Norwegian
Constitution
§ 102.

Alle har rett til respekt for privatlivet og

familielivet sitt, for heimen sin og
kommunikasjonen sin. Det må ikkje
utførast husransakingar, så nær som i
kriminelle tilfelle.

Dei statlege styresmaktene skal sikre eit

vern om den personlege integriteten.
What the legal right to privacy protects: Protection objects

Property Person Communications Data

• Home • Body • Correspondence • Data about

• Premises • Honor • Papers oneself
• Papers • Reputation
• Family
Data Protection and Ethics
Lecture 3
Page 27
Who can • Governments
invade your • Businesses
• Individuals
privacy?
The need for balance
Laws often exist to balance conflicting values.

In other words, the law does not deal with absolutes.

There is no absolute right to privacy.

Justified interference

• ECHR, art 8(2)

• Interference with a person’s privacy
right is justified if it
– is ‘in accordance with the law’; and
– pursues a legitimate aim and
– is necessary in a democratic
society and proportionate in order
to achieve any such aim
Discussion Identify competing interests to the
right to privacy and discuss how
3 mins these interests come into conflict
 • National security
Competing • Public safety
• The right to do business
interests • Freedom of expression
 AI and Data Ethics
Privacy and Surveillance
Page 33

2 Surveillance

What is surveillance and what are its dangers?

Discussion
What is surveillance and what are
3 minutes its dangers?
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Surveillance: What is
it?
• “the focused, systematic and routine
attention to personal details for purposes of
influence, management, protection or
direction.” David Lyon
• Four key elements
• It is focused on learning information about
individuals
• It is systematic; it is intentional rather than random
or arbitrary
• It is routine.
• Surveillance can have a wide variety of purposes —
but more typically to influence or control
Classic/old fashioned
• Government (top-down) surveillance
• Ominous government eye
• Watching and listening to everything citizens
do and say
Classic/old fashioned con.
Modern-Day Surveillance
Unlike Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984,
modern-day surveillance “functions
by means of ‘likes,’ ‘shares,’
‘favorites,’ ‘friending,’ and
‘following’ ... that make us expose
our most intimate desires and
deliver ourselves to the
surveillance technologies.”

Bernard Harcourt (2015). Exposed

Dataveillance – for profit surveillance
 • ‘We know where you are. We know where
you’ve been. We can more or less know what
Google’s way you’re thinking about’
• Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt
The Loss of
Public-
Private
Divide
The Chinese Social Credit System – Total
Surveillance + Reward/Punish
 Discussion from John Oliver video on facial
recognition technology
Discussion 1. What is your understanding of facial recognition
technology and how it works?
based on 2. What are the benefits?
Video 3. What are the key challenges and risks associated
with its use?
4 minutes
4. Do you think the benefits outweigh the risks?
5. What should (ought to) be done to tackle or
mitigate the risks?
Facial recognition technology &
the complete loss of practical
obscurity
• Practical obscurity
• The cost and practical difficulties
associated with privacy intrusions
(surveillance)
• Privacy protective feature
• Facial recognition removes the costs
• No need for human labour to identify the
person on camera
• Software can instantaneously
• Match to a person/picture to pictures in
a database or video
• Instantaneous notice with certainty
/accuracy
Key features of modern-
day surveillance

• The loss of public and private divide

• Voluntary participation of subjects
• Possibility for immediate intervention
• Reward/punish
Discussion
Which types of privacy are
3 minutes particularly threatened by it?
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Privacy
Some harms to privacy

• Information privacy
• A of lot data is being collected and
shared without users’ informed
consent
• Decisional/associational privacy
• Surveillance has chilling effects
that make people less likely to
associate with certain groups
• Hinders self-development
• Intellectual privacy
• Surveillance can cause people not
to experiment with new,
controversial, or deviant ideas
Harms beyond privacy
• Freedom of thought and expression
• People less likely to attend rallies and speak about controversial things
• Self-censorship and inhibition
• May stifle innovation
• Surveillance stifles the space needed to ‘freely tinker’, which is necessary for
innovation – related to intellectual privacy
Power imbalance between
the watcher and watched

• Risk of a variety of harms

• Discrimination
• Manipulation
• Coercion
• Threat of selective enforcement
• Prosecuting or blackmailing
government critics for wrongdoing
unrelated to the purpose of the
surveillance
 At first, they feared he was being
influenced by the communists.
Accidentally, through their wiretaps, the
FBI discovered that King was having
extramarital affairs. And so they shifted
their focus to uncover all evidence of his
infidelity by bugging and taping him in
his hotel rooms and by paying informants
to spy on him. Eventually, the FBI penned
and sent an anonymous letter to King,
along with some of their tapes,
suggesting that he should kill himself.
For profit
manipulation:
Facebook targeting
ads to users who feel
“insecure,” “anxious,”
or “worthless”’
Political advertising:
using your data to
manipulate your vote
 • Individual interest
• Personal dignity and integrity
Why protect • Protection against discrimination
• Societal interest
privacy? • Pluralistic and democratic society
Remember not all
surveillance is undesirable

• Surveillance can be desirable

• As a deterrent to crime
• To investigate crimes
• Thus, not all surveillance is
illegal
• Always about balancing
between different interests
AI and Data Ethics
Introduction
Page 56
Reading for Lecture 8

Mandatory Reading

• 22 Hildebrandt, M. (2020). Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk. OUP Open access. Chapter
7 ‘Copyright in Cyberspace’, esp 197-200.
• 23 Rosati, E. (2019). Copyright As An Obstacle or An Enabler? A European Perspective on Text and
Data Mining and its Role in the Development of AI Creativity. Asia Pacific Law Review; Hong Kong
27(2,) 198-217.
• 25 Carroll, M. W. (2015). Sharing research data and intellectual property law: A primer. PLoS
Bology, 13(8).
https://perma.cc/ZG8Z-KY6E
AI and Data Ethics
Introduction
Page 57

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