Ethical Considerations in the Deployment of IoT Sensors for Autonomous Vehicle Monitoring

Abstract

The development and deployment of IoT devices entails complex and multidimensional issues related to privacy, security, safety, ethics, legal, and environmental considerations. The resulting heterogeneity and complexity of IoT ecosystems pose a rich and potentially confusing set of interactions among the individual systems and users, with the consequent risk of emergence of collective purposes and mechanisms for policy intervention. In order to optimally harness the individual devices in a collective take-on task, a top-down approach would have to take into account any composite functions which can be derived and to provide incentives to the device owners. Second, to avoid any unsafe and/or unethical synergistic effects — which neither a traditional bottom-up nor the mentioned top-down approach can guarantee — flexible and language-oriented soft law policies should be established to govern the collective action-states and kinematic network witnessed, adaptively and dynamically, in an ‘emic’ way. The authors believe that endorsing amongst the various collective interacting systems some commonly accepted soft laws is a crucial step towards managing human-centred IoT collectives in the public domain and their responsible collective behaviour [1].