AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms

网络世界是一个充满好奇但又充满不确定性的世界。它丰富了生活的许多方面，但同时使公民面临可能对他们、他们的亲人和更广泛的社会造成伤害的各种威胁。其中许多危害是由不同利益相关者推动的社会过程的复杂相互作用造成的——我们称之为复杂危害。例如，考虑智能家居，其设备可以管理能源使用，车库的闭路电视摄像机以及整个房屋中越来越多的集成IT组件。有了这种技术，家庭中的动态可能会发生变化，例如提供监控功能。这可能造成危害，包括家庭暴力、隐私丧失和大型企业收集不成比例的大量人口数据。这就提出了一些问题：个人、朋友和家人在减轻潜在危害方面的作用是什么？如何与设备供应商合作，以尽量减少伤害？法律应该干预吗？AGENCY项目将使用一些案例研究来回答这些问题：健康科技、身份管理、智能家居和在线虚假信息。以上这些复杂的伤害往往发生在公民身上，而且在大多数情况下，它们不是公民故意造成的，也不是公民容易控制的。AGENCY项目坚信，建立公民机构是解决这些复杂危害的任何变革性方法的绝对必要因素。公民需要通过加强机构的技术、行为和流程来获得控制权、所有权、安全感，从而获得对其在线活动的信任。防止复杂危害是一个棘手的问题，因为牵涉到如此多的利益相关者，而且许多危害是实际使用和技术发展的意外后果。因此，减轻复杂危害需要跨学科的协同设计原则、技术基础和协作治理程序，以确保在多个利益相关者利益存在下的在线公民代理。该项目汇集了计算机科学、以用户为中心的设计、商业、心理学、社会学、法律和伦理专家。如果AGENCY成功，它将提供对在线代理在保护公民方面的作用的深刻理解，并将为我们的社会提供协作方法、技术构建模块和科学基础的最佳实践，以提供更积极主动和结构化的方法来保护在线公民。

The online world is a curious but uncertain world. It enriches many facets of life but at the same time exposes citizens to a variety of threats that may cause harm to them, their loved ones and to wider society. Many of these harms result from a complex interaction of societal processes driven by diverse stakeholders-we call these Complex Harms. Consider for example smart homes, with devices that manage energy usage, CCTV cameras for the garage and increasingly integrated IT components throughout the house. With such technology, the dynamics in families may change, for instance offering monitoring capabilities. This may results in harms that may include domestic violence, loss of privacy and gathering of disproprotionately large sets of population data by large industries. This raises a number of questions: What is the role of the individual, friends and family to mitigate potential harms? How can one work with the device provider to minimize harm? Should the law interfere? The AGENCY project will use a number of case studies to answer these questions: HealthTech, Identity Management, Smart Homes and Online Disinformation. Complex harms such as above tend to happen to citizens, and, in most cases, they are not purposely caused or easily controlled by citizens. The AGENCY project believes firmly that establishing citizen agency is an absolutely necessary ingredient for any transformative approaches that resolve these complex harms. Citizens need to be empowered through agency-enhanching technologies, behaviours and processes to gain a sense of control, ownership, security, and consequently trust in their online activities. Protecting against complex harms is a wicked problem because so many stakeholder are involved, and because many harms are unintended consequences of the practical use and evolution of technology. Therefore, mitigating complex harms requires interdisciplinary co-design principles, technology foundations and collaborative governance procedures to assure online citizen agency in the presence of multiple stakeholder interests. The project brings together computer science, user-centered design, business, psychology, sociology, legal and ethical experts. If AGENCY succeeds, it will provide a profound understanding of the role of online agency in protecting citizens and will deliver collaborative methods, technological building blocks and scientifically grounded best practices for our society to provide more proactive and structured approaches to protecting citizens online.