Focusing on the Ethical Challenges of Data Breaches and Applications

Abstract

Ethical challenges of the human lifeworld that are caused by data breaches and applications are steadily increasing. Therefore, a new ethical concept must be brought into focus: Technoethics for Emerging Digital Systems (TEDS). TEDS is presented as an integrative and innovative approach committed to an interdisciplinary perspective. Thereby, TEDS reflects all social areas of the human lifeworld in their ethical scope. With recourse to phenomenological methods, TEDS helps to address ethical implications which arise from deep interference of autonomous systems with the human lifeworld. The meaning of intentional structures and the problem of appresentations in the phenomenological sense still represents a blank gap in the current ethical discourse on the problem of data breaches. The findings provide methods for dealing with ethical challenges and explain the problem area of an appropriate technoethical use in the lifeworld. In this way, problems can already be avoided in the development process of artificial intelligence systems and their applications by specifically searching for blind spots in a technical and ethical manner. Furthermore, this approach helps to assure a technoethical use of autonomous systems in an appropriate way and ultimately leads to a limitation of damages – which may occur in case of malfunctions and data breaches of artificial intelligence systems – in the lifeworld of humans. Our contribution is to introduce TEDS as a new ethical concept that has not existed before. This new concept focuses on the application of phenomenological methods to detect ethical errors in digital systems.