Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs / Leiden University College

This paper aims to examine a Perpetrator Group who is responsible for the most terrorist activity: attacks, casualties, tactics, weapons, and targets since 2000• but especially in 2014 the organization has generated over 80% of deaths through terrorism in Nigeria. It's the highest number of such killings recorded by any other country in the world (more than 300%).

According to International resources, it holds the second largest number of deaths related to terrorism. Moreover, we'll explore in various ways: how terrorism is anchored not only in fundamentalism but also in domestic politics, regional and social dynamics through the education models presented to us. And if we are in a clearer position we'll provide a picture of what Boko Haram means to its Country.

In this paper I will elucidate why ‘situation’ is a constructive unit of analysis for the study of both identity and the impact of technologies (particularly ICTs) on identity. Further, I will use a situational perspective to show some of the ways in which the ‘definition of situations’ may be affected by such technologies. I will conduct a conceptual analysis of the ‘definition of a situation’, looking into the notion of ‘scripts’, to show how alterations in scripts lead to changes in the ‘definition of the situation’, and these in turn lead to shift in the development and expression of identity.

Het lijkt wel alsof technologieën zich als een olievlek over ons dagelijks bestaan verspreiden. Iedereen maakt er vroeg of laat gebruik van. Toch is er ook een aanzienlijke groep van niet-gebruikers, mensen die om verschillende redenen geen gebruik maken van technologie. Wie zijn deze mensen en wat zijn hun redenen voor niet-gebruik?
En verspreidt technologie zich inderdaad wel als een olievlek over onze levens? Maar liefst 44 procent van de Amerikanen is ontevreden over, of heeft helemaal geen behoefte heeft aan het gebruik van informatie- en communicatietechnologieën. Wat zegt dit feit?

At the end of the 1990s Philips, a consumer electronics company from the Netherlands, presented it technological vision of tomorrow`s world, called `Ambient Intelligence`. In this vision, networks of technology will be embedded into our everyday surroundings – hidden from view in our homes, our offices and even in public spaces. These networks will provide us with personalized services and information, adjusted to our individual wishes and needs, based on the context in which we find ourselves. What`s more, they will act proactively – they will not simply respond to a user`s wishes, but can `read` our needs and wants, and therefore even serve us with exactly the right information even before we knew we needed it.

In this book Bibi van den Berg, a philosopher of technology, analyzes the Ambient Intelligence vision and its early manifestations, as these are coming into being today, and investigates what the impact of these technologies would be on the ways in which individuals interact with one another and with the technologies themselves. She describes the way in which Ambient Intelligence technologies will shape and change our identities – the ways in which we construct a sense of self, and express and experience that sense of self.

Neurotechnologies, such as functional Mangetich Resonance Imaging and Deep Brain Stimulation, are currently mainly used in the health sector for research, diagnosis and therapy. But neurotechnologies could also be used for human enhancement, for instance to improve cognitive functions.

Moreover, insights from neuroscience are increasingly used for legal purposes, for instance to determine a suspect`s responsibility for his actions or to distinguish truthful from deceptive statements. These three domains of applciation raise different important ethical and legal questions that require further discussion.

Similarly, the application of robotics and autonomous technologies in various (social) situations - the home, hospital environments, traffic and in war - raises a number of ethical and legal issues. These include questions such as: what are the ethical implications of applying robots in the health sector with regrad to our ideas about human dignity and autonomy?

What are the consequences of using robotics in war? And can we hold robots liable if they play an ever more important role in our daily lives?

This book, which was created in light of a conference on the topic that was held in the spring of 2011 at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, brings together 19 papers on the fascinating developments in neuroscience and robotics, and the legal, ethical and consequences these developments may have.

I will investigate the ways in which Ambient Intelligence, the technological paradigm of the near future proposed by the European Union and the electronics multinational Philips, will affect the ways in which individuals construct and express their identities. The Ambient Intelligence vision predicts a world in which technologies will deliver personalized services in a proactive (rather than a responsive or interactive) fashion. I argue that this brings about a change in the way we interact with these technologies, which in turn has an effect on the way we construct and express identities in relation to such technologies. In a world of Ambient Intelligence, I will argue in this article, technological artifacts may come to function as ‘reference collectivities’, comparable to human reference groups. Due to their proactivity, their level of autonomy and self-reliance and our personalized interactions with them, these technologies will come to function as ‘others’, rather than as ‘quasi-others’.

In recent years research has shown that most social network sites pose serious privacy and security risks for individ- ual users. From the existing analyses of privacy and security risks in social network sites we deduce that one of the biggest catego- ries of privacy risks revolves around the notion of ‘audience seg- regation’, i.e. the partitioning of different audiences and the compartmentalization of social spheres. Since audience segrega- tion is an important mechanism in everyday interactions between people in the real world, we argue that social network sites ought to include this mechanism as well. Current social network sites lack this mechanism. We present Clique, a privacy-preserving social network site that provides ‘audience segregation’ to its users as an alternative.

Location-based social networks – or ‘SpotAFriendNow appli- cations’, as we call them – are currently undergoing tremendous growth. These mobile Internet applications combine geographic or locational data with social network functionalities. To date, researchers have extensively discussed two trends in network and mobile technologies over the last decades: (1) the virtualization of our social interactions in everyday life; (2) the ongoing individualization and the anti-social nature of mobile communication. We argue that SpotAFriendNow applications can be un- derstood as an interesting response to these two trends. First, since these applications base their behaviors on the user’s bodily location in the real world, the physical is returned to the equation in technologically me- diated social interactions. Second, SpotAFriendNow applications enable individuals to connect with (unknown) others in their physical proxim- ity, thereby facilitating what we call ‘ad hoc intimacy’, and thus coun- tering the ongoing trend of hyper-individualization enabled by (mobile) technologies.

Research shows that most social network sites contain serious privacy risks for users. Many of these risks revolve around users´ inability to know exactly who the “audience” is that witnesses their online behaviours. In this article we argue that in the offline world individuals regularly use the strategy of “masking” to hide their visibility when the composition of their audience is unknown. We claim that “masking” should also be facilitated in social network sites to enhance users´ privacy-protection. However, SNSs´ platform design, focused on self-presentation, makes its implementation difficult.


Read More: http://www.oldenbourg-link.com/doi/abs/10.1524/itit.2011.0621

In 1970 Mori introduced the notion of the ‘uncanny valley’ in robotics, expressing the eeriness humans may suddenly feel when confronted with robots with a very human-like appearance. I will use the model of the uncanny valley to speak about privacy relating to social network sites and emerging technologies. Using examples, I will argue that the uncanny valley effect is already manifesting itself in some social network sites. After that, I will project the uncanny valley into the near future in relation to emerging technologies, and argue that awareness of the uncanny valley effect is of great importance to technology designers, since it may be a factor in humans’ acceptance of and willingness to use these technologies. Will the uncanny valley be everywhere in the technological world of tomorrow?

In the field of Law & Technology, scholars investigate the legal and regulatory consequences of the advent of new technologies, for example with respect to ICTs, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, or neurotechnologies. It is important to investigate whether technological developments in these fields require adjustments in existing legal frameworks, and whether technological developments themselves need to be regulated. Moreover, in Law & Technology scholars also investigate the ways in which technological artefacts can be used to regulate. This is called ʻtechno-regulationʼ.
This paper has two goals. First, I will analyse the concept of techno-regulation and propose that it needs to be broadened. Techno-regulation focuses on the intentional influencing of human behaviour through the implementation of values, norms and rules into technological artefacts. However, extensive research in various disciplines has revealed that the design (shape, form, functionality) of technological artefacts greatly affects usersʼ tacit and implicit responses to these artefacts. Since this has direct relevance to the theme of regulation, I propose to widen the reach of techno-regulation by speaking of ʻtechno-elicitationʼ instead.
In the second part of this paper, I focus my discussion of techno-regulation and techno- elicitation on the design of robots, which is relatively uncharted territory in the field of Law & Technology.

Citizens increasingly use the Internet to buy products or engage in interactions with others, both individuals and businesses. In doing so they invariably share (personal) data. While extensive data protection legislation exists in many countries around the world, citizens are not always aware (enough) of their rights and obligations with respect to sharing (personal) data. To remedy this gap, users ought to become better informed of companies’ data processing practices. In the past, various research groups have attempted to create tools to this end, for example through the use of icons or labels similar to those used in nutrition. However, none of these tools have gained extensive adoption, mostly because it turns out that capturing privacy legislation in simple, accessible graphics is a complicated task. Moreover, we believe that the tools that were developed so far do not align closely enough with the preferences and understanding of ordinary users, precisely because they are too ‘legalistic’.

In this paper we discuss a user study conducted to gain a better understanding of the kinds of information users would wish to receive with respect to companies’ data processing practices, and the form this information ought to take. On the basis of this user study we found a new approach to communicating this information, in which we return to the OECD’s Fair Information Principles, which formed the basis for (almost all) data protection legislation. We end the paper with a rudimentary proposal for an end user tool to be used on companies’ Web sites.

Technology affects behaviour. Speed bumps, for instance, provide an effective way to enforce speed limits imposed by the legislator. In cases such as these, technology is instrumental to the enforcement of legal norms. This kind of regulation by technology, techno-regulation, or ‘code as code’ has become part of the contemporary regulator’s toolbox. The idea underlying this kind of influencing behaviour by means of technology is relatively straightforward. Norms can be transformed into computer code or architecture in a way that affords certain actions or functions and inhibits others. What is less clear is what the boundaries of techno-regulation are. In this paper we analyse how technology affects human behaviour and we present a typology of techno-effects in order to provide a clear boundary of techno-regulation vis-à-vis other normative and functional aspects of technology. We survey topics such as nudging, affordance, scripts embedded in technological designs, and anthropomorphization. The paper draws from legal philosophy, STS, human computer interaction and regulation theory.

In een themanummer over digitalisering in de filosofie kan een artikel over techniekfilosofie natuurlijk niet ontbreken. Deze tak van de wijsbegeerte heeft enkele vroege voorvaderen – grote filosofen als Plato, Aristoteles, Kant, Rousseau en Marx hebben allen hun licht laten schijnen op de vraag ‘wat is technologie en welke impact heeft zij op de menselijke conditie?’ (Voor een overzicht zie Scharff & Dusek, 2003). Maar de techniekfilosofie heeft pas echt een vlucht genomen aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw, een tijd waarin techniek op allerlei terreinen tot ontwikkeling kwam: van transport- tot infrastructurele technologie en van communicatietechnologie tot de opkomst van lopende band-productie. In de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw is de techniekfilosofie, met de opkomst van digitale technologieën, uitgegroeid tot een stevig gevestigde discipline met een flinke omvang en statuur.
Dit artikel laat zien hoe de techniekfilosofie in de twintigste eeuw is veranderd in het licht van de technologische ontwikkelingen die plaatsvonden. Wij zullen betogen dat de twintigste eeuw kan worden opgedeeld in drie opeenvolgende fases van technologie- ontwikkeling: het systeemtijdvak, het apparatentijdvak en het netwerktijdvak. Elk van deze drie fases heeft eigen techniekfilosofische vragen opgeroepen, en leidde tot een verandering in het onderzoeksdomein van dit vakgebied, alsook tot veranderingen in de grondhouding en aannames van de techniekfilosofie. De wijsgerige bestudering van technologie wordt, zo zullen wij betogen, in sterke mate beïnvloed door de ontwikkeling van haar onderwerp. In een variatie op Marshall McLuhan’s adagium ‘het medium is de boodschap’ kun je dan ook stellen dat in de techniekfilosofie het medium de maat is.

The paper at hand presents an approach for the visualization and end-user verification in the area of online data privacy and data protection. The emphasis is on an increasing transparency and ease of use for both, the end-users and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) within the European Union. The end-user, respectively the data subject, should be able to request, edit and delete data which he provides in online-services to SMEs and be able to understand for which purposes companies are using its data. This should be represented in an understandable and visually appealing way. On the other hand, SMEs should be supported in being compliant with the international and national data protection laws and legal experts should be enabled to edit data access without technical knowledge or assistance by technical personal. This paper shows how such a framework is currently implemented and which are the main components of the architecture.