The 5 Guidelines of Ethical Ubiquitous Computing

Features: Current EventsCritical Path Innovation: Computers, Interactive ControlPeople: Adam Greenfield

The guy who runs infosthetics recently went to a conference on pervasive computing (those crazy people with budgets, huh). He sat in on a talk by Adam Greenfield about the ethics of ubiquitous computing. The talk was about the ethics of ubiquitous computing, aka 'everyware' (software that is ubiquitous). The 5 points Adam lays out are:

(1) all ubiquitous systems should default to harmlessness.
(2) ubiquitous systems should be self-disclosing (e.g. be clearly perceptible, "seamlessness" must be an optional mode of operation). proposal of 5 different graphical icons to disclose capabilities of an object (see first image above the post).
(3) be conservative of face, so that ubiquitous systems do not unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users.
(4) ubiquitous systems should be conservative of time, not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations.
(5) ubiquitous systems should be deniable, offer users the ability to opt out, always & at any point.

It all sounds pretty reasonable to me.


Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is to reduce automated spam submissions by blocking poorly made spam bots.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.