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This chapter examines technology-facilitated violence from the perspective of international human rights law. It explores current research relating to technology-facilitated violence and then highlights the international human rights instruments that are triggered by the various forms of such violence. Ultimately, it focuses upon international human rights to privacy and to freedom from violence (especially gender-based violence) and the obligations on State and Nonstate actors to address violations of these rights. It argues that adoption of a human rights perspective on technology-facilitated violence better enables us to hold State and Nonstate actors to account in finding meaningful ways to address violence in all of its forms.

Background: This work is a situation analysis of reported human rights abuses that have characterized the COVID-19 controls and lockdown in some countries of the world. This is as documented by reliable mass media sources, relevant international organizations and human rights non-governmental organizations between January 2020 to April 2020.

Methods: A combined content analysis, critical analysis, and doctrinal method is applied in this study in line with the reproducible research process. It is a secondary-data-based situation analysis study, conducted through a qualitative research approach.

Findings: The findings revealed among other things that: COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews' enforcement by law enforcement officers contravened some people's fundamental human rights within the first month. Security forces employed overt and immoderate forces to implement the orders. The lockdown and curfew enforcements were not significantly respectful of human life and human dignity. The COVID-19 emergency declarations in some countries were discriminatory against minorities and vulnerable groups in some countries.

Research limitations/implications: This report is based on data from investigative journalism and opinions of the United Nations and international human rights organizations, and not on police investigations or reports. The implication of the study is that if social marketing orientations and risk communication and community engagement attitudes were given to the law enforcement officers implementing the COVID-19 lockdowns and or curfews, the human rights and humanitarian rights breaches witnessed would have been avoided or drastically minimized.

Originality: The originality of this review is that it is the first to undertake a situation analysis of the COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews human rights abuses in some countries. The study portrayed the poor level of social marketing orientations and risk communication and community engagement attitudes amongst law enforcement officers, culminating in the frosty police-public relationships.

The received wisdom underlying many guides to ethical research is that information is private, and research is consequently seen as a trespass on the private sphere. Privacy demands control; control requires consent; consent protects privacy. This is not wrong in every case, but it is over-generalised. The distorted perspective leads to some striking misinterpretations of the rights of research participants, and the duties of researchers. Privacy is not the same thing as data protection; consent is not adequate as a defence of privacy; seeking consent is not always required or appropriate. Beyond that, the misinterpretation can lead to conduct which is unethical, limiting the scope of research activity, obstructing the flow of information in a free society, and failing to recognise what researchers’ real duties are.

The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for which types of service tasks robots will dominate and where humans will dominate. Second, this paper examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to service robots, and advances the service robot acceptance model. Third, it provides an overview of the ethical questions surrounding robot-delivered services at the individual, market and societal level.

This paper helps service organizations and their management, service robot innovators, programmers and developers, and policymakers better understand the implications of a ubiquitous deployment of service robots.

This is the first conceptual paper that systematically examines key dimensions of robot-delivered frontline service and explores how these will differ in the future.

This chapter focuses on governance as a key element of the safeguarding system of the family enterprise. The management is in charge of the company’s performance in terms of profit and growth. The governance system is designed to secure value protection by designing a robust leadership system, monitoring and advising management, reviewing critical decisions, and providing fail-safe solutions in case of serious malfunctions of the management system. This chapter develops a typology of critical elements which could endanger the development of the company, including conflicts and disruptions among the owner group. Results of recent research on the root causes of the downfall of family enterprises are presented. Finally, a concept of a three-layer protection system is developed with the aim of providing stability for longevity.

A policy of surveillance which interferes with the fundamental right to a private life requires credible justification and a supportive evidence base. The authority for such interference should be clearly detailed in law, overseen by a transparent process and not left to the vagaries of administrative discretion. If a state surveils those it governs and claims the interference to be in the public interest, then the evidence base on which that claim stands and the operative conception of public interest should be subject to critical examination. Unfortunately, there is an inconsistency in the regulatory burden associated with access to confidential patient information for non-health-related surveillance purposes and access for health-related surveillance or research purposes. This inconsistency represents a systemic weakness to inform or challenge an evidence-based policy of non-health-related surveillance. This inconsistency is unjustified and undermines the qualities recognised to be necessary to maintain a trustworthy confidential public health service. Taking the withdrawn Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NHS Digital and the Home Office as a worked example, this chapter demonstrates how the capacity of the law to constrain the arbitrary or unwarranted exercise of power through judicial review is not sufficient to level the playing field. The authors recommend ‘levelling up’ in procedural oversight, and adopting independent mechanisms equivalent to those adopted for establishing the operative conceptions of public interest in the context of health research to non-health-related surveillance purposes.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are periodically collecting data through randomly dispersed sensors (motes), which typically consume high energy in radio communication that mainly leans on data transmission within the network. Furthermore, dissemination mode in WSN usually produces noisy values, incorrect measurements or missing information that affect the behaviour of WSN. In this article, a Distributed Data Predictive Model (DDPM) was proposed to extend the network lifetime by decreasing the consumption in the energy of sensor nodes. It was built upon a distributive clustering model for predicting dissemination-faults in WSN. The proposed model was developed using Recursive least squares (RLS) adaptive filter integrated with a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter, for removing unwanted reflections and noise accompanying of the transferred signals among the sensors, aiming to minimize the size of transferred data for providing energy efficient. The experimental results demonstrated that DDPM reduced the rate of data transmission to ∼20%. Also, it decreased the energy consumption to 95% throughout the dataset sample and upgraded the performance of the sensory network by about 19.5%. Thus, it prolonged the lifetime of the network.