Ethics of Big Data

• Alberto Giubilini and Helen Kennedy, Head to Head: the ethics of vaccine passports and COVID passes, The Conversation, December 23, 2021

[Helen Kennedy:] I always refuse to make predictions, but the future is where the concern lies, isn’t it? It’s the concern of privacy advocates and of organisations like Big Brother Watch that vaccine passports may lead us to a checkpoint society or a more surveillance-based state. And even if there was a policy that guaranteed it isn’t going to happen, that could change in the future. Policies change, circumstances change. What’s interesting is that maybe a year and a half ago, the language of crisis could be mobilised to justify measures that people might not find acceptable in normal times. But a year and a half later, it is still mobilised as a justification for things. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben talks about the state of exception. His argument is that if you always describe things as a state of exception, you can try to get away with murder all of the time. [Read more].

Achraf Baznani, Into the Abyss, 2014. Courtesy of WikiArt.