Ethical Issues in Ubiquitous Computing – Three Technology Assessment Studies Revisited

This paper discusses ethical issues in ubiquitous (or pervasive) computing from the perspective of the general discourse on ethics in computing, which started in the 1970s, two decades before the “ubicomp” vision emerged. The IFIP “Human Choice and Computers” conferences are used as points of reference for the general computing ethics discourse, and three technology assessment projects related to the ubicomp vision serve as a (nonrepresentative) sample of documents from the discussion of ethical issues in a ubicomp world. Revisiting these studies from the general computing ethics point of view shows that the basic issues have persisted, but ubicomp has added new aspects that were not anticipated in the earlier discourse.