Speaker
Description
As initiatives in recent years have emerged in both the public and private sector experimenting with new and increasingly intelligent technologies in the city, privacy has become an important topic of scholarly discussion. However, relatively few authors have focused exclusively on the particular toll these, especially AI-driven, technologies may take on the privacy of the homeless. Not only are the unhoused vulnerable by virtue of being impoverished, but when technologies are employed in public spaces, it may be impossible for them to escape their reach. Moreover, intelligent technologies are also now being implemented by homeless servicers, pitting a homeless person’s desire for privacy against their desire for help. This article attempts to move scholarly discussion about homelessness forward by analyzing how new and increasingly intelligent technologies alter the privacy landscape for the unhoused. It employs Helen Nissenbaum’s influential framework for privacy as “contextual integrity” to investigate changes to the privacy of the homeless in three relevant contexts. Nissenbaum’s theory asserts that, for every social context, certain information-sharing norms exist and privacy is violated when those norms are transgressed. Here, her framework is used to expose the way that new technologies alter the parameters of information-sharing norms in three contexts relevant to the unhoused – in public and collective spaces, when using personal technologies, and in spaces targeting the homeless. The main findings across contexts include changes to the privacy of the homeless resulting from the replacement of human actors with machines, the heightened power of machine-led inferences in their lives, increased access to their intimate and identifying information, and greater potential for data linkage. Next, the implications of such changes are discussed. Certain dangers are identified – a heightened risk of punishment and decreases in agency – while opportunities are also found – greater protection and increases in agency. Key debates about the merit of machines over humans, proportionality, and the role of consent and agency are explored in connection to the unique situation of the homeless. Finally, suggestions are made for possible ways to enhance the agency of the homeless with regard to their data collected by new and intelligent technologies.
References
Nissenbaum, H. (2010) Privacy in Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sparks, T. (2010) 'Broke Not Broken: Rights, Privacy, and Homelessness in Seattle', Urban Geography, 31 (6), pp. 842-862. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.31.6.842.
| Keywords | homelessness; privacy; technologies; AI |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
