The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a exciting opportunity for businesses and society. However, to many citizens and businesses, the IoT represents little else than a buzzword. To fully realize the potential power, citizen and consumer adoption of the IoT is critical. This project will provide a baseline of consumer and citizen understanding of ethics, privacy, and trust in the Internet of things. We will uncover psychological representations of ethics, privacy, and trust. Using online discussion of privacy, ethics, and trust around data ownership, sharing, and usage, we can extract the essential psychological dimensions along which psychological representations in this domain vary. We can build these representations with off-the-shelf data science techniques such as latent semantic analysis. The key objective is to uncover the different ways in which people think about these issues.
Target Outcomes:
- Psychological representations based on machine learning: Using text records of discussion about privacy, trust, and ethics around the IoT (e.g., from discussion forums, blogs, and news reports) we will construct a PETRAS semantic space. The space will represent the major dimensions along which PETRAS issues vary.
- Engagement: With consumer groups (e.g., Which? and the Financial Conduct Authority) we will run two staggered workshops. In the first, we will generate scenarios. In the second, we will report back with representations measured from consumer groups.
- Organisational Issues: A mapping of actors’ representations of beliefs pertaining to ethics, privacy and trust from a managerial and organizational cognition perspective including cyber security issues. This will be used as a basis for a comparative study.
- Scenarios: A portfolio of IoT scenarios illustrating the breadth of ethics, privacy, and trust issues. These will be used both as experimental materials for further research and as a handbook for citizens, businesses, and consumer bodies.