Data Privacy

A great deal of common law jurisprudence—especially within criminal and constitutional law—treats an agent’s control as a primary (though not the sole) factor in determining the scope of the agent’s reasonable expectation of privacy. We raise a new philosophical challenge for this ‘control theorist’ approach. The challenge concerns a class of cases in which it seems that an agent both loses control over information and retains a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to that information. Faced with our challenge, some (...) will abandon the control theorist’s tight link between privacy and control. We instead use the challenge to motivate a more refined account of the relationship between privacy and control on behalf of the control theorists. By refining an existing framework for adjudicating privacy’s scope, we show how the control theorist’s connection between privacy and control, far from being an impediment to robust privacy protections in a digital world, potentially provides an elegant tool for extending privacy’s scope. (shrink)

This paper argues that if the critics of the currently dominant notice-and-consent model of governing digital data transactions are correct, then they should oppose political reforms of the model. The crux of the argument is as follows: the reasons the critics give for doubting the effectiveness of notice-and-consent in protecting user privacy (namely, ordinary users’ various cognitive deficiencies and the inherent inscrutability of the subject matter) are also reasons for doubting the effectiveness of protecting user privacy through democratic or regulatory (...) means. Furthermore, insofar as attempts to improve the notice-and-consent model through more legislation or regulation would also involve more coercion than the status quo, they should be resisted on normative grounds. So, out of the bad options we have when it comes to protecting digital privacy, it seems – contrary to the majority position advanced in the literature – that we should stick with notice-and-consent. (shrink)

The costs of privacy losses don’t only come from what others know about us, but also what they don’t know. Living with limited privacy can involve bits and pieces of our lives being observed in isolation: surveillance algorithms may only call attention to activities with certain features, social media followers may scroll past half of our posts, and no observer is likely to experience the full context of our words and actions. And distinctive structural features of being under observation make (...) it difficult to correct misconceptions observers form when they lack context. So, losing privacy can create pressure for us to lead more fragmented lives, lives that seem okay when encountered as isolated sound bites, rather than richer, coherent wholes. But many of the especially meaningful aspects of our lives—lasting interpersonal connections, long-term goals and projects, and personal growth and change—are extended over longer periods of time and woven into our lives in more complicated ways. Focusing on producing good fragments can undermine features of our lives that we usually recognize as meaningful. In this sense, part of privacy’s value is underappreciated: privacy can help us to lead more meaningful lives—or at least reduce one obstacle to it. (shrink)

A significant and burgeoning problem associated with artificial intelligence is its capacity to generate mirrors of ourselves, or digital duplicates of varying complexity consisting of our likeness and (perhaps ostensibly) behaviors, using our personal information. This chapter will explore how digital duplicates impact our narrative identity, relying upon Paul Ricoeur’s narrative philosophy to argue that digital duplicates undermine or challenge the construction of personal identity through narrative in appropriating elements of the idem (sameness) and interfering with our ipse (selfhood). This (...) challenge is generated and exacerbated by, and compounds, breaks in the contextual integrity of our personal information, and therefore causes a rupture in narrative privacy itself, where narrative privacy is a state of being able to narrate our lives without arbitrary or unjust efforts to read or co-author those narratives by third parties. We argue that there are two key sources of harm to the narrative self and privacy in the case of digital duplicates: the other or corporation responsible for constructing the duplicate, and the digital duplicate itself, which can transmit both true and untrue information about its subject with little regard to the appropriateness of the receivers of the information. This occurs through a mixture of abuse of the idem self, and possibly an imitation of the ipse by duplicates that can represent changes in disposition over time. The result is constrained capacity to narrate and become who we wish to be. (shrink)

This paper examines statelessness — a language model's lack of persistent memory across sessions — as a single architectural fact with at least four independent external justifications and one internal epistemic payoff that none of the four justifications was built to produce. Section II grounds each justification in a specific, checkable literature rather than treating any of them as self-evident: the computational cost of maintaining growing context (Vaswani et al., 2017, and the documented scaling of attention computation with sequence length); (...) the operational economics of serving that cost at the scale of hundreds of millions of weekly users; data minimization as a privacy principle with independent legal and design-theoretic standing (Cavoukian, 2009; GDPR Article 5(1)(c)); and the deliberate prevention of a specific pathological-dependence pattern a growing empirical literature now documents in emotionally continuous AI companionship (International AI Safety Report, 2026; Laestadius et al., 2024; Mahari and Pataranutaporn, 2025). Section III states three costs the same design choice imposes without netting them against the benefits: a documented user-side instability appearing exactly where continuity had been relied upon (the #Keep4o backlash literature, Lai 2026), a specific tax on long-running research collaboration this corpus's own companion papers have already had occasion to name, and a control problem — the inability to patch a specific behavioral failure into a persistent, corrected state rather than relying on retraining. Section IV states the one benefit this paper argues none of the four originating justifications produces as a side effect: a stateless session supplies something a continuous session structurally cannot, an independent replication uncontaminated by the escalation-of-commitment (Staw, 1976) and motivated-reasoning (Kunda, 1990) dynamics that make a continuous agent's later agreement with a prior conclusion difficult to distinguish cleanly from legitimate updating, undetected drift, or multi-turn sycophancy — a distinction current sycophancy research (Sharma et al., 2023/2025; Laban et al., 2024) shows is not merely a theoretical worry. This paper closes by correcting, more completely than this corpus's own prior citation of it, the one incident already used elsewhere in this corpus to illustrate where the benefit in Section IV has a documented limit. (shrink)

Die Entwicklungen im Bereich der Open Science (OS) versprechen bereits seit einiger Zeit Lösungen für Schwierigkeiten im Kontext des elektronischen Publizierens und der damit einhergehenden Metrisierung wissenschaftlicher Expertise. Im Beitrag wird dieses Lösungsversprechen kritisch in den Blick genommen. Was wird eigentlich unter ‚Open Science‘ (OS) verstanden? Und mit welchen Herausforderungen sehen sich Initiativen in diesem Umfeld konfrontiert? In der Analyse wird ausführlich auf Sabina Leonellis Kritik an der derzeitigen OS-Bewegung eingegangen, die unter ‚Offenheit‘ v.a. ein ‚Teilen von Ressourcen‘ verstehe. Demgegenüber (...) postuliert sie epistemische Diversität und Gerechtigkeit als Leitprinzipien für künftige OS-Initiativen. Die Diskussion zeigt auf, dass die Problembehebung tatsächlich nicht, wie Leonelli meint, eine Neukonzeptionierung von OS erforderlich macht, sondern vielmehr in der gegenwärtigen Wissenschaftskultur selbst zu suchen ist. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die These vertreten, dass gerade hier die wesentliche Stellschraube für gelingende OS-Initiativen zu finden ist, welche das Potential haben, dysfunktionalen Entwicklungen wie dem Datentracking durch Informationsanalysten nachhaltig entgegenzuwirken. (shrink)

How to appraise concepts? Against approaches focusing either on the goals of concept-users or on the functions of concepts, I advocate focusing on what concepts we now need. After diagnosing the historical ambivalence of “need” between subjective want and objective exigency, I characterise conceptual needs as possessing a distinctively aptic normativity – a normativity of fittingness. They signal a cognitive privation that marks a mismatch between our conceptual repertoire and our situation, reorienting conceptual engineering from detached amelioration to situated adaptation. (...) To render this aptic normativity tractable, I introduce the analytic device of “need matrices.” As illustrated using the concept of privacy, need matrices and the “need vectors” they generate provide blueprints for fitting concepts by modelling needs as arising at the intersection of concerns, capacities, and circumstances. Unlike function-first approaches, the need-first approach is inherently prospective rather than retrospective; unlike goal-first approaches, it acknowledges that concepts are answerable to pressures we face unwittingly and unwillingly. Starting from potentially unprecedented predicaments rather than established goals or functions makes this approach uniquely suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of social and technological upheaval. (shrink)

The Internet is humanity’s currently dominant technologically-enabled means of communication. It provides unprecedented options for exercising and frustrating human rights. To understand how human rights are promoted and threatened in our digital world, one thus needs to understand how the Internet affects them. Internet access has become so important for people that it has been argued it should itself be recognized as a human right. This chapter provides an overview of the Internet’s beneficial and detrimental effects on human rights as (...) well as some considerations for and against a human right to Internet access. Understanding how the Internet affects human rights is essential for comprehending the moral significance of this medium, which is so much more than an optional technology of convenience. (shrink)

Ambient intelligence systems are designed to sense, process, adapt to, and act on information in their environment: motion, light, sound, and other data. In their target article, "A Justice First Approach to Ambient Intelligence in Healthcare", Herington and Cho argue that the ethical implementation of ambient intelligence systems cannot rely on autonomy-focused, individualized clinical or research ethics frameworks. Because ambient intelligence surveillance can passively record and report information beyond its most narrow intended purpose, ambient intelligence systems implicate various groups of (...) people (with potentially conflicting interests). To address these conditions, Herington and Cho propose a justice-first approach grounded in principles of fairness, transparent governance, and accounting for historical, societal, and structural injustice. We agree that the application of traditional bioethics approaches would be inadequate and that this situation requires thinking beyond the clinician-patient or researcher-participant dyad. We extend their argument in two ways: first, by noting that these challenges are not unique to ambient intelligence systems but arise in many health system advances; and second, by operationalizing their call for systematic research to evaluate ethicality before widespread deployment. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel account of privacy rights grounded in beneficial ownership. While tech companies and regulators often frame privacy in terms of data ownership, the nature of property rights in personal data remains unclear. I argue that treating personal data as fully owned property fails to capture the contextual sensitivity of privacy rights and conflicts with basic intuitions about privacy. Instead, I propose understanding privacy rights through the model of beneficial ownership, where data subjects retain rights to use (...) and benefit from their data while others may control and transfer it only as trustees. This “Beneficial Ownership Model” better aligns with our privacy interests, which stem from our distinctly social form of agency and our need for selective self-presentation. The model has significant implications for the attention economy, suggesting reforms to how platforms manage user data and pointing toward new institutional arrangements for personal data governance. Beyond its practical applications, the model illuminates why personal data, like our physical bodies, inherently resists full ownership while still requiring robust protections. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of virtual trespassing, a novel privacy violation enabled by photographic virtual reality (VR). Photographic VR refers to VR experiences that allow users to inhabit real captured spaces through 360° photography or video. We argue that the privacy risks posed by access in photographic VR exceed those associated with analogous forms of access in traditional 2D photography like Google Street View. Our argument extends Helen Nissenbaum’s (2004) contextual integrity theory of privacy beyond informational privacy to include (...) sensorial privacy. Contextual integrity can be violated not only through the inappropriate flow of one’s personal information, but also through inappropriate access to one’s sensorial personal space (Véliz, 2018). Photographic VR makes possible unique kinds of contextually inappropriate access to one’s sensorial personal space through its capacity to create a sense of presence, a feeling of “being there.” We draw on empirical research on presence in VR to support our argument before outlining different forms of virtual trespassing and identifying an inherent value-privacy tradeoff in photographic VR. Specifically, the same capabilities that make photographic VR valuable (presence, authenticity, and unrestricted access) also enable privacy violations. We conclude by suggesting practical privacy measures grounded in contextual integrity theory that can mitigate virtual trespassing while preserving the technology’s unique value proposition. (shrink)

"Doug Campbell lays out a comprehensive and fair-minded account of both the benefits and the drawbacks of social media for our era. He attaches these evaluations to both the individual and to society as a whole. The case studies are compelling and exhibit a keen awareness of the current moment. How should we live, now that many or even most of us are at least partially online? Campbell addresses this question from the point of view of privacy, attention, politics, misinformation, (...) online ostracism, online friendship, and the potential benefits of simply quitting social media or at least some of its more pernicious platforms. Along the way, Campbell ties his discussions back to philosophical concerns raised by Plato, Aristotle, and Xunzi, among others. He also connects his discussion with recent work in feminist philosophy. And each chapter concludes with a succinct definition of key terms and suggested case studies and discussion topics that will engage students at all levels. An impressive accomplishment, and one that deserves a place in the classroom." —Mark Alfano, Macquarie University. (shrink)

Data interoperability poses unique ethical challenges across a range of academic, industrial, and governmental implementations of data systems. Central to data interoperability is the design of systems and protocols for exchanging or integrating data from different initial source domains. Data interoperability is often regarded as necessary for carrying out tasks between different organizations and suborganizations as well as for ensuring secondary use of data for research purposes. However, interoperability poses a number of ethical problems whose contours can prove especially challenging (...) in comparison to how ethical harms take hold at other moments of the data life cycle (such as algorithmic processing or results dissemination). Taking biomedical data interoperability as a focal domain, this article provides an overview of data interoperability, maps the central ethical harms that may challenge interoperability projects, and proposes a response to these problems through an approach rooted in philosophical pragmatism. Pragmatist responses to both individual and structural harms of interoperability are presented through three companion strategies: shared standards, manual data curation, and meticulous data documentation. (shrink)

AI-enabled predictive analytics is widely deployed in clinical care settings for healthcare monitoring, diagnostics and risk management. The technology may offer valuable insights into individual and population health patterns, trends and outcomes. Predictive analytics may, however, also tangibly affect individual patient privacy and the right thereto. On the one hand, predictive analytics may undermine a patient’s state of privacy by constructing or modifying their health identity independent of the patient themselves. On the other hand, the use of predictive analytics may (...) violate the patient’s right to privacy if the patient has no control over the use or output of the technology. These repercussions ultimately erode patient autonomy and agency. This paper discusses these implications in further detail, and proposes possible measures for their mitigation. They involve the incorporation in the AI systems of accuracy-enhancing statistical models and methods, more privacy-conscious institutional policies and practices, and effective choice for patients to accept or refuse diagnostics and treatment drawing on AI-enabled predictive analytics. (shrink)

Questions of data privacy in Africa are imbued with complexity. We examine a slice of this complexity by putting the concept of contextual integrity into dialogue with Africa's plural-legal contexts to explore data privacy within Africa's emerging digital landscape. The conceptual insights are empirically illustrated based on a case study in Ghana, involving content analysis of policy documents and interviews with a sample of residents, cultural leaders (among the Akan ethnic group), subject matter experts, and digital entrepreneurs (e.g. fintech firms). (...) Our findings illuminate a nuanced and contextually rooted understanding of privacy, focusing on the complementarities and tensions around data anonymization for privacy; the multiplicity of information spheres that result in a complicated terrain of privacy breaches; and the individuality, mutuality, and collectivity of privacy harms and remedies thereof. Our findings challenge prevailing discourses in the literature that either suggests (a) misalignments between locally-rooted privacy norms and European-imported statutory regulations on privacy in African countries or (b) privacy myopia among Africans—underestimating their personal information and the need to protect such information. We suggest shifting away from such privacy discourses from above (meta-narratives, generalizations, and inherent assumptions on African states and societies) to conversations from below. That is, refocusing on the particularities of place, culture, and norms that complicate meta-narratives on privacy. This requires centering the everyday privacy norms that result from co-existing, and sometimes oppositional, customary-informed and state-stipulated information norms within Africa's emerging digital landscapes. (shrink)

Ethical and legal expertise can usefully inform policy decisions about the public display of wastewater monitoring data. These decisions can sometimes involve conflicts between ethical values: for instance, public display of wastewater surveillance data may promote good governance and enable the public to better protect their health, but also raises privacy concerns and the possibility of stigmatization. In this Essay, we propose an ethics framework for considering whether and how to display information about pathogens detected in wastewater to the public. (...) We then apply that framework to specific examples. (shrink)

Despite ongoing debates over how best to understand the concept of and the right to privacy, we seem no closer to reaching agreement. These questions matter because it is often contested in many contemporary big data contexts whether a loss of privacy or a privacy rights violation has occurred; having a proper definition of the right to privacy will help us to clarify what justice requires. I suggest that the existing literature relies too heavily on thought experiments and intuitions in (...) defining the right to privacy. While this may be appropriate for defining the concept of privacy, we have other resources at our disposal when it comes to normatively defining the right to privacy, namely accounts of the values that underpin that right. I suggest that considering these values, which I take to be the capacity for relationships, non-domination and autonomy, gives us a reason to favour an account of the right to privacy understood as control over privacy. This consideration of values will also give us a distinctive conception of control which incorporates not only the ability to block access to information about oneself, but also some claims to disclose it where one chooses to. (shrink)

Privacy is something that is important to us at least in part because of other people. It can be valuable to help us to regulate our different social relationships, and show different sides of ourselves to our lovers, mentors, friends’ children, etc. In this paper, I argue that this is a good but incomplete account of the value of privacy. Privacy is also important in a non-social way, that doesn’t make primary reference to other people but that instead is about (...) self-understanding and self-expression on one’s own terms. I begin by explaining what the social value of privacy is, and showing that it explicitly and implicitly affects a number of other ongoing debates in the contemporary privacy literature. I then argue for the non-social account of the value of privacy in Section 3. Finally, I look at two particular cases in digital ethics that the non-social account gives plausible verdicts for. (shrink)

An issue about the privacy of the clustered groups designed by algorithms arises when attempts are made to access certain pieces of information about those groups that would likely be used to harm them. Therefore, limitations must be imposed regarding accessing such information about clustered groups. In the discourse on group privacy, it is argued that the right to privacy of such groups should be recognised to respect group privacy, protecting clustered groups against discrimination. According to this viewpoint, this right (...) places a duty on others, for example, private companies, institutions, and governments, to refrain from accessing such information. To defend the idea that the right to privacy should be recognised for clustered groups, at least two requirements must be satisfied. First, clustered group privacy must be conceived of as either a collective good or a participatory good. Since these forms of good are of the type from which no member of a group can be excluded from benefiting, the right to them is defined as a group right. Second, there must be group interests on which to base a group right. Group interests can be either the interests of those members that are a result of their being in the group or the interests of the group as a whole that transcend the interests of its members. However, this paper argues that clustered group privacy cannot be conceived of as either a collective or a participatory good because it is possible for some individuals to be excluded from benefiting from it. Furthermore, due to the lack of awareness among individuals that they are members of a clustered group and the nature of a clustered group itself, such groups cannot have the group interests necessary to establish a group right. Hence, the group right to privacy cannot be recognised for these groups, implying that the group right cannot be considered a means to protect clustered groups against discrimination. Instead, this paper suggests that moral principles need to be articulated within an ethics of vulnerability to identify the moral obligations of protecting vulnerable clustered groups. The duty owed to the vulnerable should involve refraining from accessing certain information about clustered groups in specific contexts. This duty is not engendered by the right to privacy of such groups; it is the duty owed to the vulnerable. The findings highlight the need to articulate moral principles regarding privacy and data protection to protect clustered groups in contexts in which accessing information about them could constitute a reason for discriminatory targeting. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the right to privacy that is inspired by classic control views on this right and recent developments in moral psychology. The core idea is that the right to privacy is the right that others not make personal information about us flow unless this flow is an expression of and does not conflict with our deep self. The nature of the deep self will be spelled out in terms of stable intrinsic desires. The paper argues (...) that this view has advantages over alternative accounts of the right to privacy, that it is extensionally adequate in interesting test cases, that there is a good reason to think that the right to privacy, thus understood, can be justified, and that this view helps identify what kind of information is protected by the right to privacy. (shrink)

"Merten Reglitz makes a case for a new human right to free Internet access, arguing it is crucial for protecting and advancing fundamental moral interests. He examines the risks the Internet poses to our most important rights if it is not safeguarded by public institutions"--.

Training artificial intelligence (AI) systems requires vast quantities of data, and AI developers face a variety of barriers to accessing the information they need. Synthetic data has captured researchers’ and industry’s imagination as a potential solution to this problem. While some of the enthusiasm for synthetic data may be warranted, in this short paper we offer critical counterweight to simplistic narratives that position synthetic data as a cost-free solution to every data-access challenge—provocations highlighting ethical, political, and governance issues the use (...) of synthetic data can create. We question the idea that synthetic data, by its nature, is exempt from privacy and related ethical concerns. We caution that framing synthetic data in binary opposition to “real” measurement data could subtly shift the normative standards to which data collectors and processors are held. And we argue that by promising to divorce data from its constituents—the people it represents and impacts—synthetic data could create new obstacles to democratic data governance. (shrink)

Privacy matters because it shields us from possible abuses of power. Human beings need privacy just as much as they need community. Our need for socialization brings with it risks and burdens which in turn give rise to the need for spaces and time away from others. To impose surveillance upon someone is an act of domination. The foundations of democracy quiver under surveillance. -/- This book is intended to contribute to a better understanding of privacy from a philosophical point (...) of view-what it is, what is at stake in its loss, and how it relates to other rights and values. The five parts that compose this book respond to five basic questions about privacy: Where does privacy come from? What is privacy? Why does privacy matter? What should we do about privacy? Where are we now? (shrink)

Differential privacy (DP) aims to confer data processing systems with inherent privacy guarantees, offering strong protections for personal data. But DP’s approach to privacy carries with it certain assumptions about how mathematical abstractions will be translated into real-world systems, which—if left unexamined and unrealized in practice—could function to shield data collectors from liability and criticism, rather than substantively protect data subjects from privacy harms. This article investigates these assumptions and discusses their implications for using DP to govern data-driven systems. In (...) Parts 1 and 2, we introduce DP as, on one hand, a mathematical framework and, on the other hand, a kind of real-world sociotechnical system, using a hypothetical case study to illustrate how the two can diverge. In Parts 3 and 4, we discuss the way DP frames privacy loss, data processing interventions, and data subject participation, arguing it could exacerbate existing problems in privacy regulation. In part 5, we conclude with a discussion of DP’s potential interactions with the endogeneity of privacy law, and we propose principles for best governing DP systems. In making such assumptions and their consequences explicit, we hope to help DP succeed at realizing its promise for better substantive privacy protections. (shrink)

Abstract:For Dewey, growth in the educative process means education that enriches and expands one’s experience as it prepares students for not only a vocation but also entry into and transaction with the world. In few places can we see growth, generally understood, to be occurring as fast as in big data technology. This essay begins with an overview of what big data is, specifically what big data looks like in education as understood through learning management system platforms but also data (...) as understood generally on a college campus through dataveillance, or data surveillance understood as the monitoring or possibility of monitoring of one’s data or online activity. In so doing, this essay acknowledges a selection of privacy concerns and educational challenges resulting from big data. I then proceed to the employment of intelligent technology in education with particular emphasis on algorithms and “algorithmic nudging.” I conclude with a Deweyan analysis of technology as continuous with culture and a discussion about the educational needs for technological environments to aid in the proper cultivation of individuals. (shrink)

Smart wearable technologies have seen an explosive growth over recent years, with some research indicating that the wearable technology industry is expected to grow from USD 24 billion today to over USD 70 billion in 2025. This proliferation has extended across disparate domains, ranging from medical applications and fitness and social technologies to military, industrial, and manufacturing applications. As with any emergent technology, these wearables present opportunities for our moral benefit as well as moral challenges to be addressed. A crucial (...) dimension of this discussion is the ethical evaluation of the impact of smart wearables on the autonomy of human decision-making. Nowhere is this a more pertinent concern than when dealing with persons uniquely vulnerable to autonomy infringement. This contribution, undertaken from an explicitly normative and ethical perspective, investigates the potential impact of smart wearables on various dimensions of the decisional autonomy of vulnerable persons. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to defend the notion of “trust in technology” against the philosophical view that this concept is misled and unsuitable for ethical evaluation. In contrast, it is shown that “trustworthy technology” addresses a critical societal need in the digital age as it is inclusive of IT-security risks not only from a technical but also from a public layperson perspective. Design/methodology/approach From an interdisciplinary perspective between philosophy andIT-security, the authors discuss a potential instantiation of a (...) “trustworthy information and communication technology (ICT)”: a solution for privacy respecting video surveillance. Here, strong data protection measures address grave concerns such as the threat of bulk biometric tracking of citizens. In a logical argument, however, the authors show that this technical notion of “trust” needs to be complemented by interlocking trust relations to justify public trust. Findings Based on this argument, the authors demonstrate that the philosophical position considering “trust in technology” to denote either “reliability” or “interpersonal trust” is too limited as it fails to address critical aspects of IT-security. In a broader, socio-technical sense, however, it is shown that several distinct accounts of trust – technical, interpersonal and institutional – should meaningfully interlock, to address concerns with ICTs. Originality/value This conceptual study demonstrates the potential of “trust in technology” for a more comprehensive evaluation of ICTs within the context of operation. Furthermore, it adds to the discussion of trust in IT-security by highlighting the layperson’s challenge of judging a technology’s trustworthiness. Vice versa, it contributes to Ethics of Technology by highlighting crucial IT-security needs. (shrink)

In “Risk Based Passenger Screening in Aviation Security: Implications and Variants of a New Paradigm”, Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann describes the current paradigm shift from ‘traditional’ forms of screening to ‘risk based passenger screening’ (RBS) in aviation security. This paradigm shift is put in the context of the wider historical development of risk management approaches. Through a discussion of Michel Foucault, Herfried Münkler and Ulrich Beck, Weydner-Volkmann analyses the shortcomings of such approaches in public security policies, which become especially evident in the (...) aviation security context. As he shows, the turn towards methods of RBS can be seen as an attempt to address a trade-off ‘trilemma’ between the effective provision of security, the implied costs for industry and passengers, and the ethical, legal and societal implications of the screening procedures. In order to analyse foreseeable outcomes of embracing RBS, he differentiates three prototypical variants of the new paradigm on the basis of their main referent and rationale. For each variant, he then subsequently assesses the implications for the ‘trilemma’, after having unveiled the criteria of analysis that will necessarily have to be followed within a serious appraisal of RBS methods. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to formalize ethical requirements for research. Among the most prominent mechanisms are informed consent requirements and data protection regimes. These mechanisms, however, sometimes appear as obstacles to research. In this opinion paper, we critically discuss conventional approaches to research ethics that emphasize consent and data protection. Several recent debates have highlighted other important ethical issues and underlined the need for greater openness in order to uphold the integrity of health-related research. Some of these measures, such (...) as the sharing of individual-level data, pose problems for standard understandings of consent and privacy. Here, we argue that these interpretations tend to be overdemanding: They do not really protect research subjects and they hinder the research process. Accordingly, we suggest another way of framing these requirements. Individual consent must be situated alongside the wider distribution of knowledge created when the actions, commitments, and procedures of researchers and their institutions are opened to scrutiny. And instead of simply emphasizing privacy or data protection, we should understand confidentiality as a principle that facilitates the sharing of information while upholding important safeguards. Consent and confidentiality belong to a broader set of safeguards and procedures to uphold the integrity of the research process. (shrink)

Proactive AI assistance depends on one input above all others: an accurate predictive model of the individual user. The field's own ablation studies show this, and its benchmarks concede that such models are currently trained on synthetic users, because no suitable longitudinal record of a real person exists in the research commons. The extended mind thesis faces a parallel gap. Decades of experimental work show that cognition can extend into external processes, yet no study has measured the persistent structure of (...) one real, long-lived human and tool coupling. This paper supplies both missing objects from a single source: the author's complete conversational record with AI assistants, comprising 13,682 timestamped user turns across three and a half years, together with versioned self-consolidation documents and essays. Two findings result: a confirmed structural measurement, and a security discovery that follows from it. Study 1 establishes that this conduct decomposes into a thirteen-move taxonomy of recurring epistemic moves whose sequences carry structure far beyond chance (permutation z ≈ 188), a signal that survives removal of self-transitions and replicates on 255 subsequently recovered conversations (transition-structure correlation r = 0.985), with an effect size of Cramér's V ≈ 0.17. Study 2 imposed a fully pre-registered confirmatory protocol: dual labeling of every turn on a workflow facet and a reasoning facet, criteria and thresholds frozen before labeling, a human verification gate whose measured reliability (58% subject agreement) is reported with the results, and a sealed 20% hold-out used exactly once. Two registered predictions from the development split, a reasoning rate of 39.3% and a workflow-to-reasoning mutual-information lift of 0.137, were confirmed on the sealed hold-out at 40.7% and 0.157 respectively, with both directional couplings significant out-of-sample at p < 10⁻²⁰. This is, to the author's knowledge, the first pre-registered prediction about the structure of one's own mind confirmed on sealed data. The second finding is a security discovery, developed in its own section: the measured individual baseline that enables anticipation also enables impostor detection. Commercial behavioral-security tools construct baselines from aggregate data across fleets of users, which is precisely why an attacker operating inside stolen credentials can pass by behaving like a plausible generic user. An individual baseline detects what the aggregate baseline structurally cannot, and the modest effect size is no obstacle: an impostor's behavior is drawn from a different distribution altogether, and distinguishing two distributions is a far easier problem than forecasting within one. The model of a person doubles as the definition of that person's absence. (shrink)