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Search Results
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Democratic Oversight of Government Hacking by Intelligence Agencies: A Critical Analysis of Brazil and Germany
Regulating intelligence services is a challenge for modern societies worldwide. Their very modus operandi relies on tight secrecy protocols for the information gathered, internationally and domestically. Evolving surveillance techniques include exploiting the vulnerabilities of digital services, dealing on unregulated surveillance markets, and developing tailored tools. Theoretically, these actions aim at the public interest by, for instance, anticipating terrorist attacks or dismantling pedophilia networks. Nevertheless, they are increasingly used to surveil civil society without proper and demonstrated necessity or proportionality. Given the demand for increased transparency and accountability for intelligence agencies, especially when using hacking technologies, what institutional design and civic participation avenues for oversight may be proposed? How can (existing and yet-to-exist) institutions improve democratic external oversight activities in this realm? Through a comparison of Germany’s and Brazil’s legal frameworks and institutional ecosystems, the paper critically explores the meaning of “democratic oversight” of intelligence agencies, specifically observing oversight models for hacking operations. Looking at previous contributions by intelligence studies scholars in these countries and globally, the paper offers a critical-comparative analysis of institutional and political architectures to assess the levels of democratic participation. On this basis, it makes recommendations for both countries, which can be appropriated by external intelligence oversight bodies.
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Defending Informational Sovereignty by Detecting Deepfakes? Opportunities and Risks of an AI-Based Detector for Deepfakes-Based Disinformation and Illegal Activities
This paper investigates possible contributions that an AI-based detector for deepfakes could make to the challenge of responding to new forms of cyberthreats, including fraud and disinformation as a threat to democracy. The paper investigates the implications of such a tool for the emerging European discourse on digital sovereignty in a global environment. While cybersecurity and disinformation are certainly not new topics, recent technological developments relating to AI-generated deepfakes have increased the manipulative potential of video and audio-based content spread online, making it a specific but important challenge in the global and interconnected information context.
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Algorithmic Management in the Food Delivery Sector – a Contested Terrain?
Forms of algorithmic management (AM) play an essential role in organizing food-delivery work by deploying artificial intelligence-based systems to coordinate driver routes. Given the risks of precarity and threats posed by AM, which are typically related to (migrant) platform work, the question arises to what extent structures of co-determination can positively shape this type of work and the technologies involved. Based on an in-depth case study within a large food-delivery company, this article is guided by two questions: (1) How do companies use algorithm-based management and performance control, and how do the couriers perceive them? (2) What priorities, strategies, resources, and achievements do works councils and trade unions have with regard to co-determination practices? Our analyses indicate that algorithmic management poses problems of non-transparency and information asymmetry, which in turn call for new forms of and procedures for co-determination. Our study does not find evidence that AM practices aim to individually profile and discipline couriers. The main challenges for the works council and trade unions arise from the couriers’ generally precarious working and employment conditions; data- and AM-related issues do not represent the central area of conflict. However, our study identifies new demands regarding the co-determination of AM and underlines the importance of institutional regulation at the legal and sectoral level.
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How Should We Regulate AI?
In the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) – which describes the mimicking of human intelligence using technology – has made significant progress. Driven by algorithmic design, computing power and large amounts of training data, machine learning has transformed information technology, which can now augment and replace human intelligence, something that was thought impossible just a decade ago. In 2018, the European Commission labelled AI a transformative technology with the potential to raise new ethical and legal questions. Now, with the advent of generative AI, which can create content that could previously only be created by human beings, this potential has become visible to the wider public. At the same time, the European Commission’s proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) (which is now entering the final legislative stage) indicates its intentions to regulate AI. This comment wishes to highlight some key points regarding the regulation of artificial intelligence and, in doing so, comment on the current proposal.
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Human Experience and AI Regulation: What European Union Law Brings to Digital Technology Ethics
Although nearly all artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory documents now reference the importance of human-centering digital systems, we frequently see AI ethics itself reduced to limited concerns, such as bias and, sometimes, power consumption. Although their impacts on human lives and our ecosystem render both of these absolutely critical, the ethical and regulatory challenges and obligations relating to AI do not stop there. Joseph Weizenbaum described the potential abuse of intelligent systems to make inhuman cruelty and acts of war more emotionally accessible to human operators. But more than this, he highlighted the need to solve the social issues that facilitate violent acts of war, and the immense potential the use of computers offers in this context. The present article reviews how the EU’s digital regulatory legislation—well enforced—could help us address such concerns. I begin by reviewing why the EU leads in this area, considering the legitimacy of its actions both regionally and globally. I then review the legislation already protecting us—the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act—and consider their role in achieving Weizenbaum’s goals. Finally, I consider the almost-promulgated AI Act before concluding with a brief discussion of the potential for future enforcement and more global regulatory cooperation.
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The Emergence of Platform Regulation in the UK: An Empirical-Legal Study
Online platforms have emerged as a new kind of regulatory object. In this article, we empirically map the emergence of the field of platform regulation in one country: the United Kingdom (UK). We focus on the 18-month period between September 2018 and February 2020 when an upsurge of regulatory activism reflected increasing sensitivity to national sovereignty in the context of Brexit. Through an empirical–legal content analysis of eight official reports issued by the UK government, parliamentary committees, and regulatory agencies, we code the online harms to which regulation is being asked to respond; identify relevant subject domains of law (such as data protection and privacy, competition, education, media and broadcasting, consumer protection, tax law and financial regulation, intellectual property law, security law); and analyze the agencies referred in the reports for their centrality in the regulatory network and their regulatory powers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of “field,” we observe the emergence of regulators with investigatory and enforcement powers that stand in mutually unstable power relations to each other as well as vis-à-vis shifting executive and legislative interventions. Online platforms appear to acquire authority to exercise state powers.
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Commodification and Disruption: Theorizing Digital Capitalism
There is little disagreement that digital technologies are transforming contemporary economies and societies. However, scholars have only begun to systematically think about how digitalization – the process whereby more and more of what we say, think, and do becomes mediated by digital technologies – is both driven by and transformative of capitalism. This paper argues that when one speaks about digitalization, one cannot be silent about capitalism. It reconstructs commodification and disruption as key features of capitalist development. It then shows how three digital revolutions – the platform, (big) data, and artificial intelligence revolutions – have ushered in a new wave of commodification and disruption, giving rise to digital capitalism. Finally, it discusses the challenges commodification and disruption pose in the form of redistribution of resources, rebalancing of power, rule adaption, and market re-embedding. The paper brings together a wide range of scholarship to offer a historically and theoretically grounded framework for how to think about and study the rise of digital capitalism.
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AI Literacy for the Common Good
Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not provide solutions to pressing social questions, such as those pertaining to a peaceful, sustainable, and socially acceptable world. However, when employed in a purposeful and critically reflective manner, it can assist in formulating more effective inquiries that can enable a better understanding of the terms “AI” and “common good.” Through implementation in response to sustainability issues and given its potential as an inclusive technology, AI could be a powerful and useful tool for the common good. Despite the possibility of useful machine learning applications in terms of a positive cost-benefit calculation for its life cycle energy and resources, the majority of AI is far too energy-hungry for model training and to scale inferences. Despite the considerable variation observed in terms of certain aspects, it is evident that AI is currently neither sustainable in itself nor primarily used for sustainability purposes to address the grand challenges of global society in a world characterized by rapid acceleration. This demands a critical understanding of how AI systems work to enable society to decide upon the areas in which we should, can, or even definitely must not use AI. Based on the UNESCO Framework for AI Competency and the Dagstuhl Declaration of the German Informatics Society, we advocate for a type of critical AI literacy that can be best taught through practical use, that is, “learning by making.” This approach leads to a concise overview of existing options that facilitate a more reflective approach to using and understanding AI, including its potential and limitations. We conclude with a practical example.
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Counter-Hegemonic Neoliberalism: Making Sense of EU Platform Regulation
The platforms that hold the power in the digital economy, and the politics that surround them, are a central topic in contemporary political economy. The EU is widely perceived as a digital laggard, as it is home to very few leading digital corporations, and it is exposed to the market hegemony of the Big Tech platforms. Moreover, the EU is often considered the pioneer of digital regulation, and its platform politics have gained momentum as the EU Commission has unleashed a swathe of new regulatory initiatives, ranging from competition policies to governance of digital content, data flows and platform work. In this essay, we treat platform control and regulation as a matter of contested market design. We offer an analysis of the recent stream of EU platform regulation, questioning how it relates to the historical trajectory of the platform economy and established path dependencies within the EU. We argue that it is characterized by a critical approach to the power of digital platforms and a continuation of negative integration in the EU, and we suggest that it should be understood as a manifestation of counter-hegemonic neoliberalism, as it essentially enforces market-based governance of society through political market design.
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Labor-atories of Digital Economies: Latin America as a Site of Struggles and Experimentation
This article argues that the digital labor developments and struggles are labor-atories of digital economies, with special focus in Latin America. This means that, on the one hand, capital is experimenting and updating forms of control and exploitation - through the long trajectory of informality and dependency and, on the other hand, workers are trying and experimenting forms of organizing and collectivities, also updating Latin American rich histories of organizing, solidarity economies and community technologies. The emphasis on “labor” means that these laboratories are products of class struggles and capital-labor relationships. The paper unpacks the argument with four short insights from ongoing research: 1) Latin America as not only of research site; 2) The updating of informality in the Latin American AI context; 3) Global implications of data work, AI value chains, and the cultural sector; 4) Digital solidarity economies as a Latin American response to the current digital labor scenario, including digital sovereignty and autonomy.
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Too Far Away from the Job Market – Says Who? Linguistically Analyzing Rationales for AI-based Decisions Concerning Employment Support
This paper describes an AI-based decision-support system deployed by the Swedish Public Employment Service to assist decisions concerning jobseekers’ enrolment in an employment support initiative. Informed by previous research concerning explanations in relation to trust, appealability, and procedural fairness, as well as jobseekers’ needs and interests in relation to algorithmic decision-making, the study linguistically analyses the extent to which the system enables affected jobseekers to understand the basis of decisions and to appeal or take other actions in response to automated assessments. The study also analyses the degree to which rationales behind decisions accurately reflect the actual decision-making process. Several weaknesses in these regards are highlighted, largely resulting from the opacity of the statistical model and the linguistic choices behind the design of explanations. Potential strategies for increasing the explainability of the system as a means to meet the needs and interests of affected jobseekers are also discussed. More broadly, the study contributes to a better understanding of how the linguistic design of AI explanations can affect normative dimensions, such as trust and appealability. -
From Joseph Weizenbaum to ChatGPT: Critical Encounters with Dazzling AI Technology
The paper considers AI systems from a use perspective. It focuses on conversational chatbots, starting from Weizenbaum’s ELIZA and sketching the major scientific advances leading up to ChatGPT. The main discussion builds upon several experiment-reflection cycles conducted by the author to explore ChatGPT as a knowledge resource. The analysis considers ChatGPT responses in terms of accuracy, structure, context, perspective, and bias. The critical evaluation begins with the observation that ChatGPT produces a mixture of clear and precise results and arbitrary misinformation without ever clarifying its own scope. This leads to the identification of the system’s key problem, namely, how it contends with truth, which involves replacing the idea of truth with a probabilistic surrogate based on textual correlation. In responsible use, a system like ChatGPT must be embedded in a human learning culture. A framework for this process should include an insistence on truthfulness, an impulse towards enhancing human competence, and strengthened responsibility structures within communities.
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Pay Cashless and Be Clueless About Your Data? Navigating Tensions of Data Use in Digital Payments
This article analyzes the use practices of payment data along the payment processing chain in Europe. By first mapping the key actors involved in digital payments and their data use practices, this research offers novel insights into the multiplicity of actors that intermingle when a digital payment is made. The findings are interpreted through an adaptation of Zygmuntowski’s data governance trilemma, which seeks to balance three objectives in the context of payment data: preserving privacy, monetizing data, and enabling law enforcement. The article shows that the widespread interest in data does not stop at payment data. Preserving privacy is difficult to pinpoint due to the opacity, lack of transparency, and complexity of the data processing behind a digital payment. Meanwhile, monetizing data is a core practice for many actors, although it is pursued with varying levels of vigor. The growing availability of data poses significant risks, as information initially collected for payment processing may be used to enable law enforcement. Promising alternatives such as Wero and the digital euro could help curb the dominance of non-European players, increase transparency, and offer data-minimizing payment options.
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Algorithmic Governmentality, Digital Sovereignty, and Agency Affordances: Extending the Possible Fields of Action
In today’s socio-technical constellations, our daily online and offline lives are increasingly governed by what can be termed algorithmic governmentality. Understood as the governing of the social based on the algorithmic processing of big data, algorithmic governmentality significantly limits human agency and individuals’ abilities to control data inputs and algorithmic outputs. An antidote and a solution to governance of this kind require assembling conditions for enabling digital sovereignty. Seen as a counter-conduct to governmentality, sovereignty concerns agency, control, autonomy, authority, self-reflection, and self-determination. Foregrounded on empirical research that relates specifically to platform algorithms, this article discusses the requirements for the digital sovereignty of individuals and the socio-technical conditions that should enable that sovereignty. By introducing and conceptualizing the notion of agency affordances, the article provides several illustrative examples of how this sovereignty can be inscribed through the technical and unfold via the societal.
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Disconnecting in a Digital World: A Practice-based Approach
How individuals use or refrain from using mobile digital technology in their habitual daily practices has significant implications for their well-being. Closely related to digital well-being is the sociotechnical phenomenon of voluntary digital disconnection; a deliberate form of non-use that varies in frequency and duration. While this concept foregrounds intention, disconnection may also arise incidentally in everyday life. This study explores the phenomenon through an information systems lens and draws on sociological practice theory to examine how digital disconnection is enacted in practice, based on qualitative data from 12 interviews and 5 observations. The findings suggest that digital disconnection unfolds continuously over time, both with and without deliberate intention. Therefore, we propose digital disconnecting as a broader term that encompasses not only deliberate non-use, but also emergent, unintended forms of disconnecting. Our analysis further demonstrates that digital disconnecting unfolds along a continuum of dynamic and interrelated dimensions: temporal, mental-emotional, technical, and spatial. Importantly, regarding the spatial context, we found that places – and the placing of a digital device within them – matter for enacting digital disconnecting. Our findings further the existing understanding of disconnection strategies by highlighting that individuals may strategically use places and device placement to enact disconnecting.
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Editorial: Special Issue: Fostering Societal Values in Digital Times – Peace, Care, and Tech Regulation
Joseph Weizenbaum would have been 100 years old on January 8, 2023. This anniversary was a welcome occasion to remember the life, work, and impact of the great computer scientist and public intellectual at the Weizenbaum Institute. This special issue compiles a series of articles directly or indirectly related to his work. Contributions center on Weizenbaum as an individual and his public role as a progressive intellectual, encompassing contemporary viewpoints on ethics in digital technology.
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Sovereignty and Its Outsiders : Data Sovereignty, Racism, and Immigration Control
The concept of sovereignty invokes a nation’s authority, autonomy, and power to act. Recent societal developments invite new questions about that concept. For example, on whose behalf is sovereignty declared, particularly when it comes to “data sovereignty”? How are the benefits and costs of data sovereignty distributed in a society? Data sovereignty signals that the data produced within a certain territory should be bound by the laws and rules of that territory. However, this article argues that people on the move (migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers) are excluded from claims to data sovereignty and treated as objects of datafied persecution. That is, they are outsiders to sovereign spaces, both geographic and datafied. To investigate this situation, this article explores the historical echoes of the term “sovereignty,” especially given that the concept was particularly invoked in colonial times as a nation-building tool, applied when colonies claimed their independence while at the same time establishing internal social hierarchies. This analysis suggests that race continues to represent a key element in the hi-tech exercise of sovereignty at the border, replicating colonial and extractivist injustices against groups that are increasingly vulnerable in contemporary societies.
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Personal Responsibility and Beyond: Developing a Comprehensive Conceptualization of Digital Citizenship Competences
As digital transformation reshapes society, it is crucial to understand the evolving demands on education to prepare individuals for this new reality. Although the conceptualizations and objectives vary, digital citizenship education (DCE) typically aims to equip individuals with the competencies necessary not just to thrive in digital and democratic societies but also to critically analyze and actively shape them. However, existing efforts often focus too narrowly on technical skills and online safety, overlooking the broader notion of citizenship in educational contexts. This article addresses this gap by examining the conceptualization of citizenship within the field of DCE, led primarily by the structure of Choi’s (2016) concept analysis, and proposing a more comprehensive framework based on the citizenship ideals by Westheimer and Kahne (2004). Drawing on existing frameworks and synthesizing various DCE approaches, the article presents the Integrated Framework of Abilities for Digital Citizenship (Infra-DC). We then examine existing measurement instruments to determine their alignment with the proposed framework. This conceptual work contributes to advancing DCE efforts by promoting a nuanced understanding of citizenship and providing guidance for future research, program development, and evaluation.
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The European Strive for Digital Sovereignty: Have We Lost Our Belief in the Global Promises of the ‘Free and Open Internet’?
Digital sovereignty is the buzzword of the hour in European digital policy debates. But what if it was something more fundamental than just a new policy principle? This short essay analyses shifts in the belief system that underlies our idea of the global Internet in order to better understand the European digital sovereignty debate within its historical and political context. For this purpose, it identifies three different types of dependency that shape today’s global digital order and explains how the perceptions of these dependencies motivate the EU’s claims for more digital self-determination. What come apparent is that the liberal imaginary of an ‘open and free Internet’ could not hold up to reality and that we are in urgent need of alternative visions for a globally interconnected world. The European digital sovereignty debate can be interpreted as the first stage in the search for such an alternative. Whether it will be able to fill the gap, remains questionable.
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Editorial: Special Issue: Well-Being in the Digital World
Securing individual well-being represents an important societal goal. While governments across the world have introduced multiple initiatives to ensure and promote mental health, support for vulnerable population groups remains insufficient, highlighting the need for innovative approaches. Digital technologies offer the potential to enhance well-being. At the same time, their use can also result in numerous (unintended) risks. To enrich and stimulate scientific discourse in this area, this special issue presents five interdisciplinary contributions positioned at the intersection of digital technology use and users’ well-being. Topics include the effects of addictive design and dark patterns, the supportive role of online mental health communities, measuring eudaimonic virtues in technology interaction, gendered experiences and strategies for managing technostress at work, and dynamic practices of digital disconnection. Together, these papers contribute to a better understanding of the complexities behind technology use, provide a foundation for policy development, and aim to enhance societal awareness of how digital tools can shape users’ mental health and overall well-being.
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Unveiling ‘Algorithm Governance’: Shaping Labour Platforms’ Strategies and Working Conditions in the Digital Era
Research on platform work has primarily focused on analyzing how algorithmic management influences working conditions by empowering platforms to govern digitally-delivered services. However, prior research has overlooked the crucial aspect of how algorithmic management underlies platforms’ use of diverse contractual forms of employment available in the labor markets from where they source their workforces. Bridging this gap is vital to understanding how labor platforms integrate algorithm management, which employs digitally programmed procedures for coordinating and governing labor input, with various contractual employment structures influenced by regulations and collective actors such as trade unions. Coined as algorithm governance, this phenomenon represents the fusion of algorithm management with contractual employment frameworks, emanating from labor market regulations and policies. This essay pioneers the concept of algorithm governance, illuminating its ontological capacity to enrich debates on algorithm management. Algorithm governance thus explains how algorithm management intricately shapes working conditions by influencing the use of diverse contractual employment forms within the labor market.
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Empty Transparency? : The Effects on Credibility and Trustworthiness of Targeting Disclosure Labels for Micro-Targeted Political Advertisements
Political micro-targeting describes the use of data to identify members of a target audience and send messages designed to fit their views and resonate with them. The practice has received considerable attention of late, especially around questions of transparency. This study explores one potential solution to this quandary, namely, disclosure labels. Adopting a pre-registered online one-factorial three-group between-subjects experimental design, we have investigated how different types of disclosure labels for micro-targeted advertisements impact source and message credibility, as well as source trustworthiness. Furthermore, we have investigated the potential mediating effect of persuasion knowledge on these effects. We exposed 227 German Facebook users to either a Facebook advertisement without a disclosure label, a sponsored disclosure label, or a targeting disclosure label that stated they were targeted based on their online behavior. The results demonstrate small and non-significant differences between groups regarding source and message credibility and source trustworthiness, with no mediation by persuasion knowledge observed. Additionally, most participants did not recall the disclosure we exposed them to, potentially explaining these small effects within our sample. In conclusion, our targeting disclosure approaches were insufficiently informative. Hence, we argue that platforms should put more effort into improving transparency for their users than they currently do.
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Is Authenticity an Effective Antidote to Misinformation?
The growing impact of false and misleading information is a cause for concern. Some have suggested an authenticity crisis as the cause, namely, the fact that we can no longer be certain of the source and integrity of a particular piece of information. To fix this, the ubiquitous use of digital signatures has been proposed to (re)establish the authenticity of information. We argue that this is unlikely to curb the impact of misinformation for several reasons. First, little evidence suggests that more authenticity could theoretically solve part of the misinformation problem. In fact, the implied use of signatures as a proxy for veracity is fundamentally problematic. Second, there are significant barriers to the practical implementation of ubiquitous signing. Lastly, we point out potential negative side effects. We conclude that authenticity is not effective in countering misinformation.
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The Art of the (Platform) Deal: Tech Platforms, Fact Checkers, and the Politics of Truth
In January 2025, the platform company Meta abruptly announced that it would be ending its industry-leading third-party fact-checking (3PFC) program starting with fact checkers in the United States. This decision aligns with recent changes in the US administration and heralds a cultural shift in how big tech platforms approach both content moderation and political relations. Specifically, it marks a move away from policy that emphasizes consensus building towards more explicit political deal-making. This decision also highlights the vulnerabilities faced by fact checkers, whose economic model and democratic initiative largely depend on platform-supported fact checking. This article addresses the critical implications of these developments, considering the history of 3PFC as it relates to US politics, recent changes to digital information ecosystems, and the dynamics of power structures around the politics of information, technology, and truth.
