IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 37

coordinating that data acquisition,
and what is being done to avoid
manipulations similar to the Long
Island bridges case.

Invisible Decisions
and Ethical Matters
An analogy could be made in this
case: what if "information packets" were thought of as buses and
cars coming from different origins
(sources), and handled throughout
their paths by "bridges," and then
subject to routing criteria not necessarily clear to the society? Based
on the source address the "bridges"
may decide the preemptions, the
queuing, and the speed of processing, and act as strategically located
filters. Additionally, the discourse of
managers imply that all decisions are
based on open and socially-accepted
parameters, supported by information based on data obtained from
informational structures that operate
at full technical efficiency. However,
we claim here that this very argument does not unveil the intricacies of certain invisible aspects that
untrained eyes are unable to grasp,
from the process as a whole, to the
manipulations intended to meet specific interests.
It is timely to consider that,
although the technopoly could try
to deny it, it is necessary to reflect
on the construction of smart cities
because they can affect the rights
of their inhabitants.
These cleverly manipulated cities
remind us of the reflections, in Jonas
[14], about the role that technology
has played in an ethical sense, due
to its unique position in human life,
in which technology acts as a social
ordering entity whose detrimental
effects (unintended results caused
by the technological developments)
cannot be predicted.
A risk pointed out by postman [1]
is the disconnection that the technopoly creates between the information and its human purpose. If
the systems lack a human meaning,
the information becomes an end
in itself, what may distort reality.

An even more serious situation
would be the conscious intention to
manipulate reality, something that
can occur in the intelligence phase
by means of maneuvers that lead
the preceding (instrumentation and
connection) stages to address the
interests of specific groups.
In reality this invisibility ensures
that decision-makers can covertly
prioritize the treatment of higherclass areas to the detriment of
poorer ones. As an example of this
risk, discriminatory treatment to
certain social classes was somehow inherent in the digital participatory budget program in a large
Latin American city because of the
greater access to the Internet in the
higher social classes. Hence, a process such as voting over the Internet,
which in principle would be essentially democratic, was distorted
simply because the citizens from
privileged classes made use of their
higher digital literacy. In this case,
privileged citizens used their greater
capacity for network mobilization
to change the trend of a given vote
to favor a project of their own interest to the detriment of other projects
that appeared to be more appealing
to other social classes.
In some parts of the world,
issues related to ethnicity, culture, or religion could emerge as
a result of decisions that lead to a
loss of privacy for some minorities.
This can happen if technical decisions are motivated by the use of
particular physical, linguistic, or
cultural characteristics as a basis
for discrimination or persecution.
For example, it is possible that the
algorithms behind video surveillance systems in major European
and American cities are trained
not only to detect suspicious movements and facial expressions of
passersby, but also to direct the
search to individuals from specific
ethnic groups, supposedly more
likely to be linked to criminal or
terrorist acts. The same bias may
occur with algorithms that analyze
voice data in telephony or VOIp

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

|

SprING 2014

services, whenever this results
from prioritizing the detection of
certain languages or particular
types of accent. The decisions that
originate in all these unequal treatments might incur embarrassing
situations for many citizens simply
because they happen to belong to
these ethnic or social groups.
Moreover, particularly with
regard to privacy of collected
information, one can extrapolate a
scenario envisioned for digital cities from what already occurs in
the deployment of smart energy
grids, in order to evaluate the risks
involved. Indeed, in many pioneer
localities in which the technological
transition to smart grids occurred in
the last decade there were several
violations of the principle of privacy of data collected. In these case,
the original purpose of data collection was improving the operating
efficiency of the power grid. This
goal was distorted to serve various
state agents - either police officers,
scrutinizing household energy consumption patterns in the search for
traces that indicate activities, such
as the home production of marijuana for personal consumption, or
tax auditors looking for evidences
that someone is running a business
at home without a license. These are
also examples of invisible decisions
that, in order to meet specific interests, interfere in information flow,
filtering and redirecting data to a
different purpose from what it was
initially expect to do.
More recently, a massive leak of
classified information showed that
national security agencies in one
country were not only scrutinizing
telecommunication data from their
own citizens, but also violating the
privacy of telecom and Internet
users abroad.
Thus, it is necessary to evoke
an ethical dimension in order to
protect and inform society of such
deviations, which may undermine
the essential values of citizenship
because of decisions disconnected
from these values.
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