Cooper, Antony K. Ittmann, Hans W. Stylianides, Theo Schmitz, Peter M.U.
Abstract
Early in 2007, the CSIR conducted an experiment to track the cellular telephones of a small group of people as they moved to and from an event, to test the viability of using such tracking to provide the participants with useful traffic information. This project raised a number of ethical issues, which prompted this paper and which we discuss here. These include: - the ethics of modelling data, including the treatment of research participants; - privacy and surveillance issues related to tracking the movement of people; - the risks inherent in being tracked vs the benefits of being tracked; and - the ethics related to sending messages to drivers. We have reviewed the literature on ethics and used the results to assemble a check list of relevant ethical issues, adding a few of our own (i.e. a deontological ethics approach), against which the conduct of this research project was assessed. We also provide an overview of the experiment and the results obtained.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Omega.
Volume (Year): 37 (2009) Issue (Month): 6 (December) Pages: 1063-1072 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF