A popular “smart” device is found to be embarrassingly insecure or easily hackable, leading to a leak of sensitive data. IoT (Internet of Things) developers are having to learn that security cannot be overlooked, and privacy issues regarding the protection of user identity are as important. When we buy products like Amazon’s Alexa and invite them into our everyday lives – seeing and hearing all we do – we need to know that the personal data they collect about us is not being misused.
Hence an ‘immersive ethics tool’.
The VIRTeu project, coordinated by Irina Shklovski of the IT University of Copenhagen, is creating tools and activities that help IoT developers bring ethics into their own conversations. Their latest exploit, Bear & Co, is an immersive experience that takes you into a fictitious IoT start-up. Inspired by the real-life CloudPets — a “smart” teddy bear company whose product famously recorded and stored millions of easily-hacked conversations between parents and children online — Bear & Co invites participants to become an “employee” of the company and see how seemingly innocuous decisions can lead to ethical difficulties.
Participants are first asked to state their values – what they will bring to the company and care most about. Then, their values are tested through scenarios and problems. After they finish, their decisions are compared with their initial set of core values.
Irina Shklovski says: “Bear & Co is designed to make people think more deeply about the decisions that have to be made when developing an IoT product. On the surface, it is easy to think of these decisions as purely technical, but often there are these underlying repercussions which may conflict with the values of the developers.
“We’ve run events where we’ve asked the founders of start-ups to think about a world in which their product is in every household. The vast majority of the time, they end up with some wildly dystopian future because they’ve never considered what would happen at this scale. There are no easy answers to these issues, but it’s important for people to think about them properly, even though it can be quite uncomfortable for them.”
Bear & Co was created by the VIRTeu partner CIID Research, with Irina Shklovski from the IT University of Copenhagen and Javier Ruiz from the Open Rights Group. The CIID Research design team is Annelie Berner, Monika Seyfried, Calle Nordenskjöld and Peter Kuhberg (indsigt design). CIID Research is a research group working in interaction design, art, science and technology, from within the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.
Bear & Co will be at showcased at CHI 2019 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, an international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. CHI is pronounced ‘kai’).
