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This short chapter is an introduction to my 2018 book: The Ethics of Surveillance: An Introduction (Macnish, 2018). It is provided at the start of this PRO-RES collection of essays because it anticipates and supplements the range of issues covered in this collection and lays out some of the fundamental considerations necessary to ensure if surveillance must be conducted, it will be done as ethically as possible.

When is surveillance justified? We can largely agree that there are cases in which surveillance seems, at least prima facie, to be morally correct: police tracking a suspected mass murderer, domestic state security tracking a spy network, or a spouse uncovering partner’s infidelity. At the same time, there are other cases in which surveillance seems clearly not to be justified: the mass surveillance practices of the East German Stasi, an employer watching over an employee to ensure that they do not spend too long in the toilet, or a voyeur watching the subject of his lust undress night after night.

As an introductory text, my book does not seek to provide a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for ethical surveillance. What it does provide is an overview of the current thinking in surveillance ethics, looking at a range of proposed arguments about these questions, and how those arguments might play out in a variety of applied settings. It hence provides a useful and accessible volume for policymakers wishing to rapidly get up to speed on developments in surveillance and the accompanying ethical discussions.

Digital contact tracing technologies are critical to the fight against COVID-19 in many countries including the UK. However, a number of ethical, legal and socio-economic concerns that can affect uptake of the app have been raised. The purpose of this research is to explore the perceptions of the UK digital contact tracing app in the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) community in Leicester and how this can affect its deployment and implementation.

Data was collected through virtual focus groups in Leicester, UK. A total of 28 participants were recruited for the study. All participants are members of the BAME community, and data was thematically analysed with NVivo 11.

A majority of the participants were unwilling to download and use the app owing to legal and ethical concerns. A minority were willing to use the app based on the need to protect public health. There was a general understanding that lack of uptake will negatively affect the fight against COVID-19 in BAME communities and an acknowledgement of the need for the government to rebuild trust through transparency and development of regulatory safeguards to enhance privacy and prevent misuse.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the research makes original contributions being the first robust study conducted to explore perceptions of marginalised communities, particularly BAME which may be adversely impacted by the deployment of the app. By exploring community-based perceptions, this study further contributes to the emerging citizens’ perceptions on digital contact tracing which is crucial to the effectiveness and the development of an efficient, community-specific response to public attitudes towards the app. The findings can also help the development of responsible innovation approaches that balances the competing interests of digital health interventions with the needs and expectations of the BAME community in the UK.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether there is a lower willingness to report a crime if a victim must hand in their mobile phone as evidence. If that is the case, the research seeks to examine whether privacy concerns and lower willingness correlate with one another and thereby investigate whether privacy concerns could lead to fewer crimes being reported and resolved.

A mobile phone survey was distributed to 400 Swedish adults to identify their hypothetical willingness to report certain crimes with and without handing in their mobile phones as evidence. The results were then analysed using inferential statistics.

The result suggests that there is no meaningful correlation between privacy attitudes and willingness to report crime when the handover of a mobile phone is necessary. The results of this study however show a significant lower willingness to report crimes when the mobile phone must be handed in.

Because the chosen target group were Swedish adults, the research results may lack generalisability for other demographics. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test other demographics.

This paper’s contribution is the novel exploration of attitudes and behaviours regarding the combination of privacy, digital forensics, mobile phones and crime reportage. This research effort examined the problematic situation that can arise for victims of crime, the invasion of privacy when providing evidence by handing in a mobile phone to the police’s forensic unit for examination.