The Ethics of Personal Data Collection in International Relations

The Ethics of Personal Data Collection in International Relations

Inclusionism in the Time of COVID-19

Edited by Colette Mazzucelli
James Felton Keith
C. Ann Hollifield
Foreword by Azza Karam
Afterword by Joshua Cooper

Anthem Ethics of Personal Data Collection

This volume attests to the fact that pressing global public health concerns are ever present as subjects of societal discourse and debate in developed and developing states. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic makes the omission of the ethics of personal data collection analysis in the international relations literature even more salient given the rise of contact tracing and increased uses of mobile phone Apps to track citizens by states and firms across the globe, as this volume’s chapters analyzing the responses to COVID-19 in Iran and Taiwan explain. 

Paperback, 244 Pages

ISBN:9781839988127

January 2023

£28.99, $36.00

  • About This Book
  • Reviews
  • Author Information
  • Series
  • Table of Contents
  • Links
  • Podcasts

About This Book

This volume’s relevance may be explained, first and foremost, during a time of unprecedented loss of life around the world each day. The data, which is oftentimes incomplete and misleading, nonetheless reveals the state as deficient as well as negligent in its response to social healthcare needs. This volume attests to the fact that pressing global public health concerns are ever present as subjects of societal discourse and debate in developed and developing states. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic makes the omission of the ethics of personal data collection analysis in the international relations literature even more salient given the rise of contact tracing and increased uses of mobile phone Apps to track citizens by states and firms across the globe, as this volume’s chapters analyzing the responses to COVID-19 in Iran and Taiwan explain. 

For this reason, dialogue connecting research and practice is necessary to identify ways to address these emerging challenges at the conceptual, economic, legal, political, and social levels. The perspectives of researchers and the experience of practitioners must come together to bring the discussion forward. In response to this plea, a community of research-practitioners remains in dialogue after two Bosch Workshops at New York University to define the contents of case studies in this volume. The responsibility of this research-practitioner community is to grapple with specific issues that define the state of the discipline in personal data collection ethics. Case studies, including prominent uses of crowd-mapping platforms and mobile telephony Apps, document legal and human rights concerns in remote areas. Field research speaks to cases ranging from an analysis of Iran’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to the exploitation of personal data collection to perpetuate modern slavery through re-education camps in the People’s Republic of China to crowd-mapping stories of physical abuses in public spaces by Safecity in India.

The emphasis on the ethics of personal data collection in this edited volume through various case studies is to bring race and gender to the forefront once again as lenses to understand international relations. The myth of the founding of international relations in 1919, analyzed by Acharya and Buzan (2019) a century later, is one that obfuscates the influence of race relations as well as gender in the early development of the discipline during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These case studies broaden the ways we understand international relations in the West and, as importantly, in the non-Western space given the countries that are the subjects of analysis: China, Iran, Taiwan, and India, as well as the European Union and the United States. As the contributors focus on the relevance of race and gender across cases, this volume underlines our concerns about the future of democracy in the face of the rising tide of authoritarianism around the world. The plight of the world’s largest and most plural democracy, India, under the Modi government, the increasingly aggressive nature of China under President Xi Jinping as well as the challenge of Trumpism in the United States make these concerns, which place illiberalism at the center of developments, pressing as well as timely.

Reviews

"The Ethics of Personal Data Collection in International Relations is a timely contribution to a most urgent governance challenge of our time. The uses and misuses of data collection are amplified by the globalscale of public policy making in the era of COVID-19. As commercial and political interests assert their agendas, counter-veiling normative duties and restraints remain to be defined and empowered. Mazzucelli, Keith and Hollifield set a new agenda in this wide-ranging and thorough volume, particularly with their focus on the essential issue of inclusionism. This book is sure to guide the field of international relations in a fruitful new direction."– Joel H. Rosenthal, President, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

“This volume represents a tremendously innovative, timely and cutting-edge treatment of one of the most compelling challenges of our day and age: the focus on personal data collection, including geopolitical and cultural contexts, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken as a whole, its content is very impressive both in scope and depth. Presenting primarily a non-Western perspective, the volume provides the reader with an important overview framing these challenges cogently and providing an international relations theory foundation that recognizes, synthesizes and amplifies newer approaches in our field. Such approaches bridge a gap between older international relations paradigms and newer concepts that recognize non-state actor as well as non-Western nation roles.” —Nanette Levinson, Co-Director, Internet Governance Lab, School of International Service, American University, USA

“Few scholarly collaborations can genuinely work at the intersection of IR and international and human rights law, with the ability to engage the IR literature so robustly. Few volumes can be so thoroughly creative theoretically and yet so grounded in field studies and cases, bringing the details of analysis and context to life. At its core, this volume practices what it preaches—the abject need to shift from a Eurocentric and state-centric default in IR inquiry into a holistic approach to inclusionism. Its content does this on an indisputably urgent topic—the fate of private data collection in a time of COVID-19, a period some fear is a dress rehearsal for increasing government intrusion into long standing human rights and freedoms via emergent technologies. Without the prima facie inclusion of such lenses as gender, geopolitics, culture, concern for nature and climate, and ethnic and religious pluralism into our standard IR theories, it is unlikely that scholars will be able to help decision makers come to the right policies for dealing with personal privacy.” —Corri Zoli, Director of Research, Institute for Security Policy & Law, Syracuse University College of Law / Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs

Author Information

Colette Mazzucelli, Graduate Faculty, NYU New York, is President (Academia), Global Listening Centre.

Series

Anthem Ethics of Personal Data Collection

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Foreword by Prof. Dr. Azza Karam — Secretary-General, Religions for Peace; Word Clouds by Leslie Elizabeth Prosy, New York University; Introduction: Non-Western versus Western Reflections on the Ethics of Personal Data Collection in a Variegated “Chessboard- Web” Ecosystem, Colette Mazzucelli, James Felton Keith, and Andrea Adams; Part I; Chapter 1. Information Technology: National Security Savior or Civil Rights Disaster, Celeste Brevard; Chapter 2. Is This Chapter “Fake News”?: Exploring the Possibilities of Regulating Online Disinformation while Preserving the Right to Freedom of Expression in Europe, Sophia Ehmke; Chapter 3. Geopolitics, Personal Data Collection, and Globalization: Iran’s Response to COVID-19, Megan Cameron; Part II; Chapter 4. Taiwan’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Social Constructivist Analysis of Identity Differentiation with the People’s Republic of China, Jasmine C. Lee; Chapter 5. Reeducation Camps in Xinjiang, China: An Intersectional Constructivist Approach, Mary Davis; Part III; Chapter 6. Smartphones and Data Privacy Ethics: International Regulations in a “Chessboard-Web” Environment, Andrea Adams; Chapter 7. Ethical Considerations around Crowdsourcing Stories of Sexual Abuse and Harassment in Public Spaces: The Safecity India Story, Suzanne Goodney Lea and Elsa Marie D’Silva; Chapter 8. Protecting Privacy in a Sexual Assault Prevention Program, Lynne Chandler-Garcia and John C. Riley; Conclusion, Colette Mazzucelli, James Felton Keith, and Andrea Adams; Afterword by Dean Joshua Cooper; List of Contributors; Index.

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