AUTHOR
Richard Howley and Gilesh Pattni

ABSTRACT

Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) have been widely promoted as offering technological safeguards to data privacy and security for more than a decade. Indeed, the development of a European system for data protection that resulted from the 1995 European Directive, and the UK 1998 Data Protection Act were predicated on a presumption that PETs would feature prominently in providing privacy enhancements. Given this background it is somewhat surprising that the UK Information Commissioner recently announced that since the security breach at HM Revenue and Customs in November 2007, almost 100 data breaches by public, private and third sector organisations have been reported. Some of the most notable of these occurred in financial institutions, government agencies and UK National Health Service organisations and involve the loss of unencrypted laptops, computer disks and memory sticks. Several high profile losses have occurred whilst unencrypted data has been lost in transit from one location to another; precisely the circumstances that PETs were expected to protect us from! Clearly, there are UK organisations that are either not using PETs at all or not using them effectively to protect our data. Given the proposition that PETs would play a significant role in protecting data, the authors of this paper were somewhat surprised to witness significant data breaches occurring with what appeared to alarming regularity. Notwithstanding, the methodological impurities about the use of the term ‘regularity’, it was noted that a large number of data breaches were being reported to the British public and that many of these breaches appeared to be of a type that the application of a basic set of PETs would secure against. This is the context that gave rise to the research reported in this paper.

This research reviews the literature that exists in the area of PETs, focusing on their types, uses and levels of adoption. The findings of the literature review are reported and show the ways in which a variety of PETs contribute to data privacy and security, where and when they can be used, and the organisational context of PETs. Significantly, literature was not found on current levels of PET adoption and it was this omission that led to the development of a research instrument to further explore the nature and extent of PET usage and adoption in the UK.

The research instrument, a questionnaire, was designed and piloted before being used with respondent groups. The questionnaire sought insights into three related aspects of PET usage:

• Uses of PETs, including a consideration of which PETs are used and why.
• The privacy context of PETs, focusing on policies and procedures.
• Evaluation of PETs as providing effective privacy protection.

The analysis of the data in each of these categories is supported by an analysis of the overall respondent profile of those contributing to this research.

The main findings emerging include:

• The respondent group are mainly IT Managers in large organisations, and interestingly, very few replies came from government agencies or financial institutions.
• The majority of organisations taking part in this research reported their use of PETs and a profile is offered showing which PETs are used and the degree of their adoption.
• There is uncertainty as to what PETs actually are and what their benefits are. Representatives from other organisations, however, were able to list the benefits they feel that PETs provide. These are presented and reviewed.
• The obstacles to PET adoption are identified and explored. Clearly, this is an important issue if wider adoption and usage is seen as desirable.
• Amongst those organisations that use PETs, their application to business processes and or data is not uniformly applied. The implications of this apparent ‘optionality’ are considered in more detail and reported in the full paper.
• The usage of removable storage devices is frequently regulated and controlled and these controls are identified and their effectiveness explored.
• The range of protection procedures applied to laptops being taken off-site are identified and evaluated with regard to any tensions that may exist between business process efficiency and data privacy and protection.
• Procedures for updating PETs and or the adoption of new PETs are reported.

This research is a timely contribution to the body of privacy literature. It also serves as a basis for assessing the contribution of PETs in safeguarding our data privacy and security. In a world in which citizens are increasingly processed and or identified by digital representations the technology that is identified as being a key provider of privacy has to be known, understood and applied. This research concludes that much more needs to be done before UK organisations can fully benefit from PETs and before their data subjects can rest assured that they are fully protected.

AUTHOR
Jeroen van den Hoven and Noëmi Manders-Huits

ABSTRACT

The use of computer supported modeling techniques, computerized databases and statistical methods in fields such as law enforcement, forensic science, policing, taxation, preventive medicine, insurance, and marketing greatly promotes the construal of persons “as risks”.

In the “persons as risk” discourse, persons are characterized in terms of probabilities: probabilities that they will commit crimes (security), that they will like commercial products (marketing), are prone to accidents (safety), are likely to exhibit certain types of unhealthy behavior (preventive medicine), constitute moral hazards for insurance companies (insurance).

In the first part of our paper we present the historical background to this view by discussing two results of the work of Ian Hacking. First, a thesis of historical ontology. Hacking has argued that “people can and have been made up”, sorted and stereotyped– e.g. the homosexual, the criminal, the repeat offender, the bad credit risk, – on the basis of historically rooted classifications and concepts. Second, Hacking and others have extensively documented the emergence and prevalence of thinking in terms of probabilities about a broad range of phenomena in the last two centuries.

These two developments in conjunction, we argue, have given rise to a view of human beings which tends to conceive of them in terms of classifications, statistical categories, profiles and probabilistic models. In the field of identity management and profiling, identities and persons are construed as dynamic collections of personal data. Individuals are routinely and increasingly treated on the basis of probabilistic representations. The treatment they receive, the things they are entitled to, their rights, accountabilities, and the opportunities they are given as well as the limitations that are imposed upon them are shaped by the way their identities are construed and used.

In the second part of the paper we argue that the statistical and probabilistic construal of persons is fundamentally incomplete so as to give rise to questions about the moral justification and the limits of its use and application. First of all they do not accommodate conceptions of the moral person as acting on moral reasons and secondly they fail to accommodate a person’s self-presentations.

We confront the IT induced shift to a view of persons “as risks” with the idea –following Bernard Williams – we have termed ‘moral identification’. Persons need to be able to ‘morally identify’ to some extent with the ways in which they are represented by others and they legitimately desire to be identified by others as such, i.e. as identifying themselves with identity ideals in particular ways. Persons have aspirations, higher order evaluations and atti¬tudes and they see the things they do in a certain light. Representations of these aspects of persons are missing when they are repre¬sented as statistical elements, liabilities and risks in data bases and computer models.

In order to examine the moral problems raised by conceiving of persons as risks, the technologies that enable and support the management and creation of representations, need to be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, they are used for the descriptive mapping of (user) identities and matching characteristics, on the basis of which profiles are created. These characterizations are extremely useful for scientific purposes and support epidemiology, demographic and social science research. However, on the other hand these characterizations are also used for practical purposes, as a grid of categorical profiles, in which data subjects are classified accordingly and constrained in particular ways. Identities or representations of persons are fossilized – carved in stone – as it were, and may lead to erroneous and morally objectionable classifications in marketing, welfare, criminal justice, preventive medicine, insurance and finance and may lead to imposing unjustified constraints on actions and agency of persons.

We provide several suggestions for value sensitive design of profiling technology to accommodate these problems.

AUTHOR
David Sanford Horner

ABSTRACT

Stories of social, cultural and economic futures underwritten by the latest advances in technology are a familiar trope (Seidensticker, 2006; Selin, 2007). In this paper I will extend my recent work in which I have argued that the only rational response to the claims of ‘futurism’ should be one of profound scepticism (Horner 2005; Horner 2007a; Horner 2007b). It might be said that some claims are better then others, for example, a populist futurism may be easily brushed aside but more serious, evidentially based work surely must be taken more seriously. However, what I hope to show is that the problems that beset forecasting are not simply matters of inadequate technique and poor evidence but that the enterprise is conceptually and logically flawed and this, itself, has important ethical implications. This seems to be a miserable conclusion given that foresight has been presented as a principal means by which we might deal with the threats of uncertain futures. However, to illustrate this argument I analyse in some detail Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is near: when humans transcend biology (2005). The book is striking in the reach and depth of its projections (taking us well beyond Web 2.0!) in envisaging a future in which information technologies have developed exponentially to create the conditions for humanity to transcend its biological limitations. Kurzweil describes this as ‘the Singularity’: “…It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself” (Kurzweil, 2005, p.7). He makes the remarkable claim that: “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality” (Kurzweil, 2005, p.9). It is important to note that Kurzweil says that this ‘will’ happen; there is not even a cautionary ‘may’ happen. The book is suffused with that sense of historical inevitability famously criticized by Isaiah Berlin (1954) the ethical implication of which is a profound loss of human freedom. What underlies this vision is an idea with a long pedigree that history conforms to natural or (supernatural) laws which in themselves constitute the basis for knowledge about the future states of the world. Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near indeed presents ‘a theory of technological evolution’ as justification of the shape of future human society. In the manner of Karl Marx or Herbert Spencer he rejects a so called linear view of historical development in favour of a vast historical canvas of six historical epochs that are driven, in a law-like manner (‘the law of accelerating returns’), by the exponential growth of information and technology. I argue that this view is flawed in at least two fundamental respects. Firstly in its disregard of the notion of limiting factors which apply even in the case of the growth of science and technology (Barrow, 1999; Edgerton, 2006). And secondly, it mistakes phenomena that may be temporary, local and limited for a metaphysical principle (Seidensticker, 2006, 63 – 79). But the problems raised here are also ethical. The danger of this kind of futurism is that it radically devalues human choice and our collective ability to shape technological futures (Flew, 1967). Kurzweil’s account is remarkable in its blindness to the long history of the failure of technological foresight to deliver on its promises (Cole et al. 1974). I argue the brutal case that social foresight and technological forecasting are essentially fraudulent activities which at best are temporarily delusive but at worst may constitute a waste of valuable human and material resources. Following Edgerton’s (2006) account we need rather an ethics of ‘technology-in-use’ rather than a hypostatization of so called technological laws of development. I conclude more hopefully with a brief indication of where we might look for methods of dealing with uncertainty which do not depend on undependable and indefensible knowledge claims about future states of the world.

REFERENCES

Barrow, J.D., 1999. Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits. London: Vantage.

Cole, H.S.D., Freeman, C., Jahoda, M., and Pavitt, K.L.R., 1974. Thinking about the future: a critique of the Limits to Growth. London: Chatto and Windus.

Berlin, I., 1954. Historical inevitability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Edgerton, D., 2006. The shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900. London: Profile Books.

Flew, A. 1967. Evolutionary Ethics. London: Macmillan.

Horner. D.S., Anticipating ethical challenges: Is there a coming era of nanotechnology? Ethics and Information Technology. 7, 2005, pp. 127 – 138.

Horner, D.S., 2007a. Forecasting Ethics and the Ethics of Forecasting: the case of Nanotechnology. In: T.W. Bynum, K. Murata, and S. Rogerson, eds.Glocalisation: Bridging the Global Nature of Information and Communication Technology and the Local Nature of Human Beings. ETHICOMP 2007, Vol.1. Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan 27 -29 March 2007. Tokyo: Global e-SCM Research Centre, Meiji University, pp. 257-267.

Horner, D.S., 2007b. Digital futures: promising ethics and the ethics of promising. In: L. Hinman et al. eds. Proceedings of CEPE 2007: The 7th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry. University of San Diego, July 12 – 14, 2007. Enschede, The Netherlands: Center for Telematics and Information Technology, pp. 194-204.

Kurzweil, R., 2005. The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology. London: Duckworth.

Selin, C., 2007. Expectations and emergence of nanotechnology. Science, Technology and Human Values. 32 (2) March, pp. 196 – 220.

Seidensticker, B., 2006. Futurehype: the myths of technology change. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler.

AUTHOR
Lawrence M. Hinman

ABSTRACT

The development of the World Wide Web has spawned new opportunities for cheating and plagiarism. In this paper, I shall:

• Briefly describe the changes that technology has brought about in this area;
• Examine technological responses to these changes; and
• Suggest ways in which these emerging technological challenges can be met with non-technological responses that are far more effective.

The Technological Shift

In the last two decades, the web has opened up three categories of new opportunities for students who want to plagiarize. First, the web itself is an ever-ready source of material to plagiarize. With drag-and-drop technology, it is incredibly easy for a student to grab a few paragraphs from one source, some pages from another, and assemble them into a marginally coherent whole. On-line encyclopedias, journals, and even personal websites provide limitless possibilities.

Second, lazier students may simply want to get an entire paper from one of the numerous sites that offer already-written term papers. Cheathouse.com, for example, claims to have over 100,000 papers and essays available for purchase. They charge $15 (€10) per month to join. The quality of the essays is very uneven. SchoolSucks.com claims to have over 50,000 and sells them for $10 (€6.75) per page. MyEssays.com promises original (i.e., non-plagiarized) papers with variable pricing, and also provides a venue for students to sell their own papers on-line.

Third, some students may be lazy but demanding: they want their paper to be excellent and to fit the assigned topic perfectly. PerfectTermPapers.com sells custom papers for a wide range of pricing from $7 (€4.73) to $60 (€40.50) per page. These high-end, custom sites still offer a quick turn-around time (for a higher price, of course), and some of them even offer to provide masters theses and doctoral dissertations.

The allure of these sites is the ease and speed with which students can obtain papers. In many cases, they can turn to a term paper site at 10:00 PM, pay for the paper and download and print it, and still get a good night’s sleep before their 9:00 AM class. Such services might have been available earlier, but they were slow and tedious and required almost as much advanced planning as writing the paper itself.

The Technological Response

Just as the spread of computer viruses gave rise to a new industry of anti-virus programs, so too the spread of web-based plagiarism has created new market opportunities to combat this plagiarism. Many teachers and institutions have attempted to meet these new, technologically-based challenges with advanced technological responses of their own. These responses fall into three broad categories.

Initially, individual instructors might do web searches to find the sources from which papers have been plagiarized. This method was tedious and liable to capture only the first category of web-based plagiarism described above.

Second, various software programs have been developed to detect plagiarism, and these are moderately accurate. Many of the companies developing this software have gone out of business, but some alternatives have remained available. WCopyFind (http://plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/Wsoftware.html), for example, is a relatively simple tool that enhances web searches to find matching passages. WCopyFind is free. Eve2 Plagiarism Detection Software (http://www.canexus.com/) is a program that runs on individual instructor’s computers, and is sold for $30 (€20). AntiCutandPaste.com offers both a regular detection package and a package to detect plagiarism in writing computer code at the same price as the Canexus software.

The third and, in most people’s eyes, most effective and efficient approach has been anti-plagiarism services, most notably TurnItIn.com. No other single product has had such widespread acceptance in the United States market by both institutions and individual instructors. (See, for example, the faculty report on anti-plagiarism software from Claremont McKenna College at http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/writing/Examining%20Anti.htm for a typical assessment of TurnItIn.com) It has been on the market more than ten years, beginning as Plagiarism.org. Part of the secret of their success is that each paper that is sent to them for plagiarism-checking is itself entered into their database, insuring that anyone else that submits that paper (including the same student in a different course) will be detected. Storing the submitted papers has been subject to legal challenge, since it would seem that they are the property of the student. Detailed, color-coded reports are sent back to the instructor on each paper submitted, and institutions are encouraged to purchase institutional memberships that permit all instructors to submit all papers. Pricing is not available on their website; individuals and institutions must request a quote.

Students, of course, are more savvy than most teachers about the limits of such software, and they often resort to software-based countermeasures. Microsoft Word, for example, has long contained an AutoSummarize feature that can be used (with varying amounts of success) to foil plagiarism detection software.

Beyond Technology

Although such technological approaches to plagiarism are often as appealing to administrators and teachers as term paper sites are to students, the emphasis on technological solutions to this problem obscures more basic approaches that lack technological glitz but promise much more pedagogical substance.

The use of services such as TurnItIn.com is the educational equivalent of urine testing of athletes for drugs. It begins with the presupposition of dishonesty. Yet if trust is a fundamental value of the educational process (see the Fundamental Values Project at the Center for Academic Integrity [academicintegrity.org]), such a presupposition automatically contradicts that value. A flourishing academic community can hardly be grounded in such mistrust.

Moreover, the technological attraction of these approaches obscures more fundamental ways of dealing with such problems. If students are asked, over a period of weeks, to submit a topic for a paper, then a one-page summary and initial bibliography, and then receive criticisms and suggestions that shape the rough draft, and then develop a final draft, the need for electronic plagiarism detection disappears. The fact that the problem is technology-based does not mean that the solution must be as well. Perhaps, instead of more effective plagiarism detection technology, we simply need better teaching.

AUTHOR
Mike Healy

ABSTRACT

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.” (Mill 2003)

Applied ethics, particularly in the form of business ethics, is often seen as useful in helping to construct a range of private and public policies. The growth in interest in organisations such as the UK’s Institute of Business Ethics and CSREurope as well as the EU’s support for the European Alliance for CSR, are indicative of the extent to which ethics and associated issues are discussed in the commercial arena. Business schools in a range of educational institutions across Europe are increasingly incorporating teaching in business ethics and/or CSR. (Matten, Moon 2004) Developments in ICT have also prompted a sustained interest in computing ethics.

Similarly, diversity and diversity management have developed as key themes for employers during the past decade at both the European Union, member state, and organisational levels as the EU has sought to influence policy by issuing a number of regulations covering diversity. These regulations have been translated into national legislation (eg, the Directive concerning age and employment) which employers are required to observe. A large number of institutions have also adopted diversity training requiring employees to undertake self-paced elearning modules often culminating in an on-line test.

At the same time, many organisations have developed and sought to implement codes of ethics designed to influence and modify the behaviour of their employees as well as devising and publicising corporate social responsibility programmes. There is a significant body of research concerned with the three themes of ethics, corporate social responsibility, and age and employment. However, little has been done to examine the relationship between these categories to examine how policy initiatives have led to material change. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between ethics and diversity in the workplace in the European context by drawing upon primary research undertaken for the mature@eu project, a pan European project concerned with age diversity in the European ICT sector.

The paper opens with a review of some of the ethical arguments supporting diversity by reference to Mill, feminist ethics and contract theory. The paper then examines the extent to which ethics is used to promote diversity within the workplace by focusing on age and employment. A review is made of the reasoning for age diversity advanced by instututions such as the European Union as well as those made by organisations intimately concerned with increasing employment opportunity for more mature workers. The paper also examines the core concepts underpinning the main arguments advanced by a number of governmental and non-governmental organisations, such as the IBE and the European Alliance for CSR, that have arisen to champion ethical considerations within the business community. In doing so, the paper seeks to determine the extent to which ethical theory plays in significant role in these arguments by using the ICT sector as an example.

Age and employment have been selected as themes of study because current demographic changes affect the whole of Europe and the European Commission has attempted to respond to the challenge by initiating a range of ambitious policies. Since the March 2000 Lisbon strategy was launched with its target of full employment by 2010 and its goal to enable social protection systems to weather the impact of ageing, the EU has developed and sought to implement age diversity policies across all member states. At the same time, the EU has vigorously argued for an expansion of ICT.

Evidence is presented that shows there is a contrast between the ethical case for diversity in general and the specific arguments made by governmental and non-governmental institutions to commercial organisations in an effort to widen diversity. Further, the paper contrasts business case argument with the language used to promote diversity within the workplace is in stark contrast to the opening preamble to the EU Charter on Human Rights which comments that “Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity; …”(EU 2006). The paper also presents evidence which seems to indicate that the ICT sector, despite significant skills and shortages gaps, continues to persist in holding onto a negative attitude towards mature employees.

It is always difficult in a paper of this nature, limited by reasons of space, to comprehensively cover every particular aspect of a given area of study. The initial purpose of this discussion is to explore of some of those issues that should cause some disquiet among ethicists and those concerned with ethical aspects of policy making at the European, national and local levels for three significant reasons. If it is the need to make a business case rather than a general ethical viewpoint that shapes the direction of work in this area, it will affect research, publication, and access to funding. Secondly, if the business case for diversity proves to be problematic or the priorities of the European economy change, then diversity will cease to be a priority for organisations and diversity policies will be seen as just another set of paper exercises merely requiring the appropriate boxes to be ticked. Finally, by failing to vigorously promote the ethical arguments for diversity, policy makers miss a significant opportunity to make a long lasting convincing case that could directly influence attitudes towards age and employment for generations to come

AUTHOR
Viorel Guliciuc and Emilia Guliciuc

ABSTRACT

In our very new cyber society, the problem of the “limits” and “limitations” of the Human Being has to be refreshed. Here, the term “limit” is used as a common restriction and the term “limitation” is understood as a restriction that cannot be over passed, based on the ideas of the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica. Humankind has always over passed various limits; but not its limitations, too. For example, during the great geographical discoveries era, advancing more and more toward our western or eastern horizons, we have dismissed the limits of the world as we know the until then, but failed to go beyond the horizons themselves.

We seem to be, once again, in a great discoveries era. Only this time we are exploring the horizons of the Tool and of the Artifact. In the Digital Era, the Internet has a presence, an importance and characteristics that could suggest to the common user (cybercitizen) it is the Tool itself, or at least one of its preferred manifestations. As if we are living in the Tool Turn Era itself.

Or that is the perfect start for a discussion on the relationship between the “limits” and the “limitations” of the Human Being under the collision between the effectiveness and the virtuality in our lives. Here “limitation” should be understood both as “limit” and as “a principle, a quality or a propriety that limits the extent of something”. Our limits are often quantitative and external; instead our limitations seems to engage our qualities and our inner boundaries (against the common perspective where “limitation” can also be understood as “the greatest amount of something that is possible or allowed”).

In fact, the virtual worlds are invading our real worlds, generating a more and more schizophrenic human societies. Such a phenomenon is a real paradox, if we are accepting that the purpose of the Digital Tool is not only to link but also to expand the boundaries of our communities. However, simultaneously, somehow and apparently the Digital Tool is creating limits that cannot be overpassed, both in our living and learning activities.

Somehow, the Digital Era is provoking us to analyze if and how the Tool is becoming the privileged Medium for human everyday interactions. Let us observe and agree that the very appurtenance to an “e.community” (being on Mess, Skype; having a blog, an e-group; reading e-papers, e-journals and so on has become more and more similar to the (effective) normal social existence (activity, life) itself.

In order to have a good focus of this topic, we have to choose a privileged digital tool and a privileged philosophic analysis.

The Internet seems that special tool becoming the mediator of more and more of our personal, professional or social interactions. Our professional development, our skills, our gender identity, our equality and access, our responsibility, our learning environment and habits, our physical and mental health etc. everything, even our virtue, seems to be influenced by or dependent of this digital tool.

The Internet characteristic of being a true social mediator is nowadays so obvious that it has become almost a trivial research topic, even not all of the possible explorations has been classified. For many human societies and many human beings, especially those from the poor countries the very existence and use of the Internet remains a pure virtuality, without any link with the effective everyday survival challenges of the real life. The digital divide seems to send human being towards two more and more different modes of insertion into reality.

However, for the Western and/or Developped World, the digital tool has become a “moral mediator” (L. Magnani): “as a cognitive and moral mediator; it can provide stories, texts, images, combined with sounds, so that the information fosters not only a cognitive, but also an emotional and moral understanding. In this sense, the Internet represents a kind of redistribution of the moral effort through managing objects and information to overcome the poverty and the unsatisfactory character of the options available. (L. Magnani and E.Bardone),

The Internet could be also considered as an artistic mediator because it is reshaping and filtering (controlling) the relations between the artwork creation, the artwork display, the artwork contemplation and the artworks onlooker, challenging our artistic sensibility (ViGuera).

Even more, it is may be the perfect time to consider the Internet, as if it has become a real “values mediator” and/or a “creativity mediator”.

As “tool”, Internet itself has also to be analyzed as “limit” and/or as “limitation” of the Human Being (humankind, cybersociety etc.). It engages directly the theme: of the abdication from our responsibilities.

Concerning the appropriated philosophical analysis, a good starting point could be Heidegger’s concept of Gestell, understood as the determining factor of our time. Das Gestell implies simultaneously a frame of mind, a way of conceptualizing phenomena and a theory about what it means to have knowledge of a primary material reality. The negative heideggerian perspective is much more appropriate to a debate that the perspective of John Dewey, because it forces us to go beyond an understanding of the Tool somehow antique.

If the existence and use of the Tool seems to confess both the characteristics of the “limit” and those of the “limitation”, we have more and more the tendency to consider the Tool (and especially the Internet) as a “limitation”. Or this fact is major affecting our perception and consciousness of the reality itself. The explanation of this fact seems to be related to the universal generic presupposition we make considering the very identity and characteristics of the Net, despite its and ours universal non generic nature.