Application of information-type divergences to constructing multiple-priors and variational preferences

Abstract According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled by IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely.

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Freelance Journalists’ Ethical Boundary Settings in Information Work

Nordicom Review ◽

10.2478/nor-2013-0006 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 83-98 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Martina Ladendorf

Keyword(s):

Discourse Analysis ◽

Working Conditions ◽

Narrative Theory ◽

Ethical Reasoning ◽

Media Industry ◽

Individual Action ◽

The Media ◽

Information Type ◽

Information Work ◽

Individual Ethics

Abstract The borders between the media genres journalism and information or PR are blurring, and this development is especially noticeable among freelance journalists. How does this affect freelance journalists, particularly their ethical reasoning? Thirteen interviews with freelancers living in a peripheral northern county in Sweden were analyzed, using a combination of discourse analysis and narrative theory methods and a virtue ethics theoretical framework. It was found that 11 out of 13 informants worked occasionally or regularly with information-type assignments. To sustain the informants’ professional roles and selfidentities of integrity and impartiality, having boundary settings between, first, information/ PR and journalist roles and, second, information and journalist type assignments was crucial. It was evident that individual ethics had replaced professional principles. The freelancers reflexively process media industry constraints, together with their everyday working conditions, in a situation where the ideals and norms of the profession constitute the background for their individual action ethics.

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