Making sense of our connected world
Defining Digitalisation: Defending Ethical Principles in the Digital Age
What visions must be implemented in the future so that the digital transformation of our society works for everyone? In dialogue with stakeholders from science, politics and civil society, the international research project “Ethics of Digitalisation” has taken stock of the current state of ethics-led digitalisation. We have summarised the most important results.
Lack of digital policy in the truel of the chancellor candidates – An emancipation of the electorate
nsights into the projects in the field of digital policy are not yet available in the truels. However, if you would like to find out more, you have come to the right place: Three researchers from HIIG and HBI write about their opinions on digital policy and refer to the Digital Electoral Compass. It gives journalists and voters the opportunity to get an idea of the situation for themselves.
With Open Mind and Open Source – the democratic potential of public good-oriented AI
Dr. Theresa Züger talks to Patricia Leu from Prototype Fund about the Public Interest AI project and the democratic potential of AI for the common good.
One Council to Rule Them All: Can Social Media Become More Democratic?
Parliaments set the rules for democracies. Platforms rule their private online spaces. But as online spaces become ever more important for democratic discourse, we ask ourselves: Can we make platforms…
Siri’s evil sister. When the Dutch public service steals your data
“System Risk Indication” (SyRI) deployed by the dutch government for automatically detecting social benefit fraud. The program was shut down due to a severe lack in transparency and unproportional collection of data. This demonstrates how automating public services fails, when not properly implemented.
We need to talk about data – New report reframes the debate around data sovereignty
The dueling slogans: “free flow of data” and “data sovereignty” actually prevent seriously addressing the complex challenges of cross-border data flows. A report, released this week by the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network, reframes the debate to foster a more nuanced approach of this critical topic for the digital society.
Surveillance
The state monitors its citizens, Internet companies monitor their users – and finally we monitor ourselves and each other. Who is monitoring whom and why? What positive effects can surveillance have and when does it become a danger for a democratic society? Questions like these were posed by students of the Humboldt University of Berlin in the seminar “Tracing Surveillance – On the Trace of Surveillance” led by HIIG researcher Thomas Christian Bächle. In the contributions to this dossier they discuss their views on state and economic power and surveillance technologies.
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!
