Predicting the next Twitter

Boffins at De Montfort University Leicester, UK, have put together a team tasked with predicting the next big thing in terms of communication technologies, in a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls before they become a problem.

Over the past few years, widespread internet adoption and the pervasiveness of mobile connectivity have afforded some technologies rapid growth, but have also generated downsides. For example, internet banking has led to an increase in the amount of phishing email attempting to trick users into handing over account details, while the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of personal information available online.

Under the two year project, entitled Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA), researchers at De Montfort are aiming to identify information and communication technologies that are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years and spot any unforeseen drawbacks ahead of their widespread adoption.

Dr Bernd Stahl, reader in critical research in technology in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at DMU, said: “There is a large public interest in the type of ethical issues that new technologies may raise, in ways of understanding and classifying such issues and ways of avoiding or addressing them.

“Some technologies and their applications, such as social network sites like Facebook or Twitter, are easily identified as areas of future ethical problems.Analysing the ethical issues that may result from them is a difficult but important task if we want to be proactive in developing technology that is beneficial to individuals and society.”

ETICA researchers will identify and list the future applications and ethical issues that are likely to arise from each possible application and devise a method to grade and rank them. They will then focus on the top five issues they consider to have the highest priority and will make recommendations to policy makers based on their findings, as well as investigating governance models to see which are most likely to successfully address the ethical issues identified in the project.