Ethics Education for Participatory Urban Sensing

From UrbanWiki

Ethics Education for Participatory Urban Sensing

The mobile phone network is emerging as the largest sensor network on the planet. Mobile phone users, however, are generally unaware of the dual uses of this network, in which their communication devices are also information gathering devices. What are the ethics of coordinating this network for research purposes? Can researchers achieve meaningful consent and active participation of mobile phone users?

The NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems propose this three-year research and education project, which will:

• Research and assess an important test case in participatory ethics: a participatory approach to managing privacy in urban sensing applications;
• Create both an immersion curriculum and a seminar curriculum to teach participatory ethics for urban sensing to diverse STEM undergraduate and graduate students;
• Evaluate the curricula and disseminate best practices for education in participatory urban sensing ethics to urban sensing, ubiquitous computing, and broader technology education communities through white papers, guest lectures, video presentations and discussions, and an active website.

In participatory urban sensing, everyday mobile devices become a platform for coordinated investigation of the environment and human activity [1-5]. But transforming phones into data collection instruments raises both technical and ethical challenges. We believe researchers should utilize this network of sensors with the consent and active participation of users. Facilitating responsible, socially trusted, and participatory ethics for data collection and analysis with urban sensing systems remains an open problem, and is the challenge undertaken in this research and education project. We focus on graduate and undergraduate students who are designing systems not just “for the future” but for ongoing pilot projects that have public participation. During the research component of this project, we will formalize and qualitatively assess a test case in participatory research ethics: a privacy framework we call participatory privacy regulation. The education component of the project will teach participatory ethics such as participatory privacy regulation through development of two curricula for STEM students: a hands-on laboratory approach to designing ethical urban sensing technologies; and an interdisciplinary seminar-style course. The final phase of the project will evaluate and synthesize classroom findings into best practices for participatory urban sensing ethics education. We will disseminate the practices to educational, computing, and technology communities.

As a critical test case in participatory ethics for urban sensing, formalizing and refining participatory privacy regulation will contribute to fields struggling with meaningful privacy design, including mobile and ubiquitous computing, social networking, and web community systems design. It will draw from technical and ethical research in each area, as well as established participatory methodologies in public health and urban planning, such as Community-Based Participatory Research and Participatory Action Research. Using CENS real-world sensing deployments as laboratory experience, the research component of our project will extend the protection of privacy beyond technical solutions and into the area of user-centered design. We base participatory privacy regulation on building trust between researchers, subjects, and systems. This trust is central to the meaningful protection of privacy.

This work will benefit many areas of mobile and ubiquitous technology research. The multidisciplinarity and rapid pace of system development, social diversity of users, and application diversity of urban sensing are both exciting and pose significant challenges to developing a participatory ethics framework. But much as traditional human subjects research guidelines apply to a broad and diverse research scope [6], we believe that similarly powerful principles can be specified for human sensing research. The pedagogical tools developed in the education phase will train a diverse group of STEM students to align technological advances with human practices and ethics. Involving students in discussions and practical implementation of participatory ethics will integrate considerations of values into their research and design practice. Students and researchers trained in participatory urban sensing ethics will design systems that reflect participatory ethics and balance technical and human values. Students will also bring the ethical thinking and value commitments formed during their education to careers in academia, technology industries, and policy arenas.