Ethical issues are tripping up tech firms and the backlash can be abysmal; Irish Times, 2/11/16

Karlin Lillington, Irish Times; Ethical issues are tripping up tech firms and the backlash can be abysmal:

"Now, Europe is trying to regain the socio-political upper hand, having previously left the whole environment in the hands of the corporate world, Floridi says.

“But that is so much not the issue. The real issue is, how do you re-establish an accountable, elected, socio-political control of the internet – of what is really, the essential blood of our society. That doesn’t seem to be very clear as a problem.”

Many of the current tensions between the US and EU over issues such as corporate taxation, data protection, and privacy stem from such concerns.

Floridi was recently appointed to the EU’s new ethics advisory group, set up by European data protection supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli to consider some of these fraught areas, within the ethical dimensions of data protection.

The group has 18 months to tease out the relationships between privacy, business models, technology, human rights, and markets and their implications for privacy and data, before reporting back with a white paper...

“But we need an ethical understanding, so that can inform the political and legal side, which can then regulate digital technologies in Europe.”"