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Dr. Ian Kerr holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. He also holds cross-appointments to the Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Philosophy.
Email: iankerr@uottawa.ca
Phone: 613-562-5800 ext. 3281
Fax: 613-562-5124
University of Ottawa
Faculty of Law
57 Louis Pasteur St.
Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5 -
On the Identity Trail: understanding the importance and impact of anonymity and authentication in a networked society.
Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Idenity in a
Networked Society.Click here to learn more about the book.
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Special thanks and much gratitude are owed to one of my favorite artists, Eric Joyner, for his permission to display a number of inspirational and thought–provoking works in the banner.
On June 19th, I had the good fortune of being invited to give a dinner speech to all of the speakers at UofA’s annual access and privacy conference, Performing at the Speed of Change. Although I fully understood the drill – they wanted a lighthearted and entertaining 20 minute speil – something happened to me on the plane that turned into a Jerry Mcguire moment. I decided instead to take a more heartfelt look at a difficult and often unaddressed set of issues in privacy advocacy.
Many people who attended have urged me to post the speech, which I was originally reluctant to do both because it was a kind of off-the-cuff “moment”, and because a better, more rigorous version of it would have avoided its central problem, which is attaching only a few faces to the various positions rather than surveying a wide variety of people and positions. I reiterate here that none of this was ever meant to be about the people espousing the positions, rather to use famous examples in order to raise interesting and important questions about the appropriate roles of idealism and pragmatism.
Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian was kind enough to provide me with some very useful feedback on my ideas in spite of the fact that some of my remarks about her position were critical and, as I put it in the address, “visceral”. She is a total mensch.
Among many other things, she warned me about the danger of citing the statistics reported by Edward Greenspan, which she claims are in “wild dispute” and, in some cases, “unequivocally incorrect”. Ann also rightly pointed out that my general argument about the politics inherent in some technologies cuts both ways and will therefore work against idealist approaches in many circumstances as well. She also suggested that “privacy by design” can be used in some cases to re-design the politics of technological systems.
I decided not to alter the original text and am trying to decide whether my Jerry Mcguire moment ought to be transformed into an academic study. Let me know what you think !!
If you would like to read the original text, find it here.
For those interested in listening to the speech, you can find it here.
Last Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada released two important privacy-related decisions, both addressing an increasing trend in which Canadian law enforcement agencies use police dogs to conduct random searches of public spaces.
In the coming years, dog searches are sure to be supplemented by electronic noses, sensor networks, artificial intelligence and other highly automated systems that can operate much more conspicuously and effectively than snoop dogs. If they are subject to the same legal standards set out by the majority of the Supreme Court last Friday, it will be the state and not its subjects who will be engaging in "an elongated stare."
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In a few minutes, it will be midnight. I am sitting on the balcony of my rented san juan apartment. I just finished reading the IAAF report thwarting the olympic ambitions of oscar pistorius, the south african sprinter whose spirit has captured the imagination of the 24 students I am here to teach.
We started our three-week exchange seven days ago in Ottawa, where 12 of my University of Ottawa law students hosted 12 students from universidad de puerto rico. Together, these two dozen outstanding students are enrolled in a course that I call "building better humans?" (please note the question mark in the title.)
One of the goals of this interdisciplinary course is to illuminate the murky line between therapy and enhancement in a world that seems to be drifting from "natural selection" toward what bioethicist John Harris calls "deliberate selection."
What happens to people when science and technology are aggressively used to alter the human condition? What does the future hold for health and humanity as we move from Darwinian evolution to self-directed enhancement medicine?
Read more →A few months ago, as part of its bid to put a robot in every household by 2020, the south korean ministry of commerce, industry and energy announced its intention "to draw up an ethical guideline for the producers and users of robots as well as the robots themselves ..." Responsible computer programming, corporate accountability and consumer protection in the electronics sector -- these are all good things.
Pause. Rewind. Replay. What? An ethical guideline for the robots themselves?
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