This is a Technicom podcast.

It's not always obvious, but responsible technology activities often benefit from some ethical guidance and considerations.

And this stands to reason. After all, technology projects may bring to like new ethical issues which didn't exist before the technology did.

Hello and welcome. I'm Peter Balland from Technicon, and this is our podcast series called Ethics and Technology, a prerequisite for European research.

We look at H2020 research projects in Europe and what role ethics guidance has in order to bring them to successful conclusion.

With this guidance, technology outcomes are less likely to be plagued by unintended consequences and exclusions of humanitarian sensitivities.

It's now becoming customary to install ethics experts in technology-related

projects. But to what end, and how can we ensure that the value in ethics policies are realized

by the entire consortium? To help us get a better understanding of how this all comes together,

we welcome Rebecca Roach, a British philosopher and senior lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London, and Jonathan Seaglo, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy, also at Royal Holloway.

Together, they inform the X-Files Project Consortium about ethical considerations, which will come to light in this highly technical endeavor to create tools and methods to unlock mobile telephones, which have been taken into evidence by law enforcement agencies.

Thank you both for joining us today.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

Rebecca, we'll start with you.

When it comes to ethics, we often follow precedents or

what has been suggested, ruled, or practiced in the past. But we're talking about technology projects now,

and in many cases, there is no precedent. So how is this handled?

Yeah, this is tricky.

I mean, by following a precedent, we kind of have an easy approach that we can just do whatever,

follow whatever ethical norms have been established already, which may not be the correct ones, but,

you know, at least by following precedent, it's going to be fairly uncontroversial. So we're talking here about police access to encrypted data on people's mobile phones.

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