Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher whose writings examine logic, nature, biology, ethics and metaphysics. He studied at Plato’s Academy and later founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens.
Lexicon
Behavioural surplus is Zuboff’s name for behavioural data extracted beyond what is required to improve a service, then used to produce predictions about people’s future conduct.
Confirmation bias is a tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that favour existing beliefs, expectations or a hypothesis.
Contextual integrity is Helen Nissenbaum’s account of privacy in terms of appropriate information flows within social contexts. It asks whether gathering and distribution respect the relevant contextual norms, including for information that is already publicly visible.
Datatilsynet is Norway’s independent public data protection authority. It supervises compliance with data protection legislation through guidance, complaints handling and inspections.
For Ola O. Hårstad, the digital dimension is the technologically mediated setting in which actions acquire connections, possibilities and consequences through digital systems. It belongs to ordinary human life rather than a separate unreal world.
Epistemic dependence is reliance on other people’s knowledge or inquiry when one does not possess, or cannot independently assess, the evidence oneself. John Hardwig argues that such reliance can be rational when there are good reasons to trust the other person’s inquiry.
Family resemblance describes how cases can belong together through overlapping similarities without sharing one essential feature. Wittgenstein uses the idea to challenge the assumption that a concept must have an exact common core.
Function creep is a gradual, contestable extension of a system or practice beyond its original purposes. The term draws attention to changes that appear incremental but can alter what the system does.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets rules for processing information about identified or identifiable individuals. Its scope includes organisations established in the European Economic Area and certain activities of organisations elsewhere that target or monitor people there.
In Hannah Arendt’s account, homo faber is the human maker who builds a durable world of things. This activity of work differs from the labour that continually sustains biological life.
Ola O. Hårstad uses homo faber for the human being who extends immediate capacities through technology and thereby shapes the conditions of future life. This broadens Arendt’s account of the maker of durable things into an account of how technological creation forms the setting for later action.
An inference about personal data is a conclusion about someone derived from other information rather than directly supplied by that person. For example, known characteristics can allow an attribute to be deduced from a wider dataset.
Ola O. Hårstad uses institutionalised trust for independent oversight that continues when individuals are not examining their own person-flow. Institutions share investigative burdens that individuals cannot reasonably carry alone, while people retain their values, judgment and rights to question and act.
Instrumentarian power is Shoshana Zuboff’s term for power exercised through digital systems that monitor and shape people’s conduct remotely.
Intellectual privacy protects the activities through which people explore and develop ideas, including thinking, reading and communicating. Neil Richards argues that freedom from surveillance in these activities supports intellectual freedom.
The Johari window maps interpersonal awareness using two questions: what is known to oneself, and what is known to others. Their combinations yield four areas: open, blind, hidden and unknown.
In Hårstad’s proposed distinction, moral anonymity would mean that information no longer bears a normative connection to the people it concerns or affects. He distinguishes this proposed moral criterion from technical removal of identifiers and legal tests of identifiability.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral authenticity is a reasonable ability to recognise, examine and take responsibility for moral values as one’s own. It permits values formed through social influence, provided the person can meaningfully engage with and appropriate that influence.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral integrity is the quality of a sincere and reasonable attempt to bring authentic values, an understanding of the situation and action into alignment. It is distinct from whether the intended result succeeds and from whether the surrounding conditions make relevant connections understandable.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral intention is the willingness to let a moral value actually influence one’s choices. A value must sometimes constrain convenience or advantage, although this does not require heroic sacrifice in every situation.
Moral luck is the philosophical problem of moral judgment depending on outcomes or circumstances beyond a person’s control. It creates a tension with the idea that people should be morally assessed only for what they control.
For Ola O. Hårstad, moral orientation is the reasonable effort to understand what one’s values require in a concrete situation. It complements moral intention: willingness to follow a value needs an informed attempt to find how to act on it.
Ola O. Hårstad calls a digital system relatively closed when a user can reasonably understand where an action ends, its purpose and its context. It becomes open as the action continues into morally relevant purposes, actors or uses that were not apparent in the original situation.
Person-flow is Ola O. Hårstad’s term for the continuing life of information from, about or connected to persons as it is produced, linked, interpreted and used. It can arise from someone’s actions, other people’s disclosures or system-generated inferences, and is not inherently beneficial or harmful.
Practical wisdom is Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of reasoning well about what to do in particular circumstances. It works with ethical character and attention to the situation, rather than supplying a complete set of mechanical decision rules.
Prediction products are forecasts of people’s likely future conduct made from behavioural data and offered to business customers. They are a central commodity in Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism.
Privacy self-management is the approach of enabling people to decide how their personal information is used through notice, access and consent. Daniel Solove argues that its effectiveness is limited by cognitive burdens and by the scale and unpredictability of data processing.
The problem of many hands arises when many people’s contributions and decisions make responsibility for an outcome difficult to trace. Helen Nissenbaum argues that this difficulty can obscure accountability without showing that nobody is answerable.
Surveillance capitalism is Shoshana Zuboff’s term for an economic logic that treats human experience as material for behavioural data. These data support predictions about behaviour that can be sold for commercial advantage.
Daniel Solove’s taxonomy groups privacy problems into information collection, information processing, information dissemination and invasion. It distinguishes harms arising from how data are handled from those caused by intrusion or interference with decisions.
Technological mediation is the way technologies shape relations between people and the world. Technologies can influence what people perceive, how they act and how social practices develop.