ICT-ethics: Sweden and Japan

Whereas the benefit and harm of a widespread deployment of CCTV cameras is controversial among scholars, ordinary people seem to have accepted CCTV systems as an electronic moral gaze. However, a massive amount of personal information has already been collected and stored in private and public databases, and dataveillance systems using ubiquitous devices automatically collect, store, process, use and share personal information in nearly real-time fashion. In addition, social media enhance Net users' communication with an unspecified number of people and their revelation of personal information not only of themselves but of others. Consequently, hardly anyone can control the accumulation of, access to and use of their personal information. In such a Net environment, people's identification of the self, which Kierkegaard characterised as "the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation", may be on the verge of a crisis as typically presented in patients with schizophrenia. This may imply an identity crisis. Indivdiuals may experience that their independence is taken over by others a symptom unique to schizophrenia This study deals with a pathology similar to schizophrenia, which many people may undergo due to the widespread use of participatory surveillance systems such as CCTV systems, dataveillance systems and social media. It is based on observations of individual and organisational behaviour in the current Net society and the results of studies on phenomenological psychopathology. Professor Karin Axelsson Applying an ethical perspective on stakeholder involvement in public e-service development Karin Axelsson is Professor in Information Systems at the Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University. She conducts research on stakeholder participation and involvement, citizens’ perspective, democracy and information security in relation to public e-services and e-Government. She is currently leading a research project about Sweden’s future safe electronic identification, focusing the development, implementation and use of a new elegitimation in Sweden.