I’m Markus Christen,
I’m the coordinator of the CANVAS project
and I am also a researcher at the University of Zürich in Digital Ethics.
Right now we increasingly hear about data breaches all over the world,
so it seems that there are huge data bases containing personal information of people
that don’t seem to be sufficiently protected.
The challenge in five years we are approaching this so called "Internet of Things",
is connected with everything, that sounds like a cyber security nightmare.
You usually tend to see cyber security as a protection of personal information, of privacy and of trust into the systems,
and this is certainly true, but I think people tend to neglect that cyber security might affect various other values as well.
For example cyber security measures can be more difficult for some people than others,
so you might have a fairness issue.
Cyber security costs money that might be better used for other things,
so there are various other types of value trade-offs you might have to take into account,
which are currently not really reflected in the strategies of the countries.
From the perspective of a scientist we are also creating personal data of people.
In the university setting we might be a little too careless in general with respect to the cyber security issues
of our own data that we are generating and storing.
I think we can handle informed consent processes very well, but security components can be very simple tools,
to protect the data by encryption, and you tend to neglect that probably because it’s working and you have a lot of other things to do.
So here I see, also at the university level, some gaps that should be adressed.