Lyon claims that much computer-based surveillance is used for social sorting. Explain, with reference to a real example, which you consider morally problematic. Explain why your chosen example raises a moral issue.
Order Description
Lyon claims that much computer-based surveillance is used for social sorting. Explain, with reference to a Real Example, which you consider morally problematic. Explain why your chosen example raises a moral issue.( Give more explanation )
must use this references :
Lyon, D. 2003, Surveillance as social sorting: computer codes and mobile bodies, in D Lyon (ed), Surveillance as social sorting : privacy, risk, and digital discrimination, Routledge, London ; New York, pp. 13 – 30.
Floridi, L. 2010, Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, library e-book (see 11.5.1 ‘Monitoring & surveillance of employees’) p. 185-188
???
Hier, S. Greenberg, J, eds. 2009. Surveillance: Power, Problems, and Politics. Vancouver, BC, CAN: UBC Press, library ebook.
boundary, not just between what is public and private information but, on top
of that, between what is inside and outside the human body, appears to leave
our normative concepts wanting. The new, intensive forms of monitoring,
categorizing, scrutinizing and, ultimately, controlling and manipulating
of persons through their bodies and embodied identities that become possible
in this new ontology suggest that some form of integrity of the person
may be at stake. Maybe not exactly “bodily” integrity in the traditional sense
associated with anatomical-physical body boundaries, but a form of integrity
yet to be defined. Especially since the gathering of body data, including even
DNA samples, becomes ever more easy, inconspicuous, inescapable, and
ubiquitous, it seems a bit like “ostrich-policy” to remain too focused on
body boundaries belonging to the ontology of anatomical-physical bodies,
rather than redevising some concept of integrity adequate to the ontology
of informatized bodies.
Notes
1 This project was carried out within the framework of the Incentive Programme
Ethics and Policy, which is supported by The Netherlands Organization for
Scientific Research. I wish to thank Jeroen van den Hoven, Jos de Mul, David
Lyon, and the participants of the international workshop on Surveillance, Risk, and
Social Categorization, 3–5 May 2001, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, for
useful comments and suggestions.
2 Thanks to Elia Zureik for pointing me to this extract.
3 It may be important to stress here that these phenomena are not mere metaphors
used in popularizations of science, while the “real body” to which such descriptions
refer remains unequivocally anatomical or physiological. Whereas it is indeed the
case that metaphors are involved here, they can be found in the most “serious”
scientific descriptions as well. Such metaphors do not refer to other more literal
concepts, but are the very stuff of scientific imagination itself. What may start out
as metaphorical – meaning carried over from another context of use – after a while
becomes the literal (Rorty 1989; Locke 1992).
4 “‘Personal data’ shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable
natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable person is one who can be identified,
directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to
one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic,
cultural, or social identity” (European Parliament and Council 1995: 10).
5 Although bodily integrity in many legal systems is conceptually subordinated to
a more general concept of “privacy” or “private life,” that is, it is often defined as
a special subcategory of a general notion of privacy, it is also generally acknowledged
as morally and legally constituting privacy’s most basic instance. The
contrast between the two ethical/legal regimes I’m drawing out here is therefore
not that between bodily integrity and privacy as such, which is a very broad and
loosely defined encompassing concept, but that between “bodily integrity”
and “informational privacy.” I argue that our concept of bodily integrity is too
narrow to deal with the broad technology-mediated transformative processes in
which our bodies are currently caught, and that it is too readily assumed that mere
Biometrics and the body 71
