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The growing complexity of the digital ecosystem in combination with increasing global risks has created the following dilemma. Overemphasizing cybersecurity may violate fundamental values
like equality, fairness, freedom, or privacy but neglecting cybersecurity could undermine citizens’ trust and confidence in the digital infrastructure as well as in policy makers and state authorities. In order to increase our understanding of this dilemma, this contribution aims to provide an overview on value conflicts in cybersecurity based on a systematic review on the ethical, legal and
technological literature on cybersecurity. It shall be emphasized that a focus on the opposition of cybersecurity vs. privacy is insufficient for understanding the ethical complexity of cybersecurity.
This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation (R&I). Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: (1) ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, (2) intra methods, dealing with technology design, and (3) ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I.
Cybersecurity is of capital importance in a world where economic and social processes increasingly rely on digital technology. Although the primary ethical motivation of cybersecurity is prevention of informational or physical harm, its enforcement can also entail conflicts with other moral values. This contribution provides an outline of value conflicts in cybersecurity based on a quantitative literature analysis and qualitative case studies. The aim is to demonstrate that the security-privacy-dichotomy—that still seems to dominate the ethics discourse based on our bibliometric analysis—is insufficient when discussing the ethical challenges of cybersecurity.
Furthermore, we want to sketch how the notion of contextual integrity could help to better understand and mitigate such value conflicts.
This White Paper outlines how the ethical discourse on cybersecurity has developed in the scientific literature, which ethical issues gained interest, which value conflicts are discussed, and where the “blind spots” in the current ethical discourse on cybersecurity are located. The White Paper is based on an extensive literature with a focus on three reference domains with unique types of value conflicts: health, business/finance and national security. For each domain, a systematic literature search has been performed and the identified papers have been analysed using qualitative and quantitative methods. An important observation is that the ethics of cybersecurity not an established subject. In all domains, cybersecurity is recognized as being an instrumental value, not an end in itself, which opens up the possibility of trade-offs with different values in different spheres. The most prominent common theme is the existence of trade-offs and even conflicts between reasonable goals, for example between usability and security, accessibility and security, privacy and convenience. Other prominent common themes are the importance of cybersecurity to sustain trust (in institutions), and the harmful effect of any loss of control over data.