Doctoral Dissertation Research: Privacy on the Roads: Values, Technical Design and the Flow of Personal Information on the Transportation and Information Superhighways

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement grant requests support for empirical data collection to investigate the value implications of two emerging technologies of everyday life, networked vehicle systems and web search engines. Networked vehicle systems (GPS-based navigational tools, automated toll collection, automobile black boxes, and vehicle safety communication systems) rely on the transmission, collection and aggregation of a particular vehicle's location and telemetry data. The drive towards the perfect web search engine (providing personalized results and delivering only relevant advertising) depends on the profiling of users' online activities and interests. Taken together, these technologies represent emerging threats to one's privacy on the roads: on the one hand, networked vehicle systems enable the widespread surveillance of drivers traveling on the public highways, and on the other, a perfect search engine facilitates the monitoring and aggregation of one's intellectual activities on the information superhighway. NSF funding is requested for travel to three carefully selected, specialized research sites that will make theoretical, material, and pragmatic contributions to this project: Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, to enrich the investigation of the relationship between values and technology, and work alongside both philosophers and engineers sensitive to the value implications of technology; Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, to work alongside other scholars dedicated to the ethics of traffic technology and observe pragmatic interventions within Swedish automotive and technical communities; and Culturally Embedded Computing Group, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, to gain a critical understanding of the relationship between technology and culture, and witness the application of critical technical practice to real design situations. Studying within these communities of scholars, in person and over an extended period of time, will not only directly inform this project's investigation of the value implications of technology, but also broaden the level of inquiry to include unique interdisciplinary and pragmatic dimensions typically separated by geographic and disciplinary boundaries and not immediately available at New York University. The intellectual merit of this project includes the deepening of the knowledge and understanding of the complex interplay between social, moral, political and cultural values and technology. Specifically, it will elucidate the value implications of two emerging sociotechnical systems as they relate to privacy in public and the privacy of one's intellectual activities. The support requested with this proposal will improve the project's rigor and intellectual merit by enabling the sharing and discussion of the theories, methods and results of contemporaneous projects with leading scholars at relevant research sites worldwide. The broader impact of this project includes bringing philosophical, legal and cultural analyses of technology into real-world design contexts with the goal of influencing technical design in value- conscious ways. Using the pragmatic tools of value-sensitive design and critical technical practice, combined with the knowledge gained by visiting sites of successful collaboration among social scientists, philosophers and engineers, this project will engage with technical communities to proactively inform design, and work generally to provide a new model for pragmatic engagement outside academia.