AUTHOR
Prof. Ugo Pagallo

ABSTRACT

In their 2007 Ethicomp paper, Reynolds and Ishikawa proposed three possible examples of criminal robots:

I) Their first hypothesis was “Picciotto Roboto.” The field pertains to robotic security guards as the Sohgo Security Service’s Guardrobo marketed since 2005. The case concerns a security robot participating in a criminal enterprise as a bank robbery. “As such, it seems that the robot is just an instrument just as the factory which produces illegal products might be. The robot in this case should not be arrested, but perhaps impounded and auctioned” (Reynolds and Ishikawa, 2007);

II) The second scenario is given by the “Robot Kleptomaniac.” Here, the machine has free will and self-chosen goals, so that it plans a series of robbery of batteries from local convenience stores, the aim being to recharge its batteries. Leaving aside the responsibilities of designers and producers of such robots, it is possible to claim that the unlawful conduct of the robot depends on – and is justifiable on the basis of – what is mandatory for survival. In any event, “the robot ultimately chooses and carries out the crime” (Reynolds and Ishikawa, 2007);

III) The final hypothesis is no longer a matter of imagination: the Robot Falsifier. In the mid 1990’s, the Legal Tender project claimed that remote viewers can tele-operate a robotic system to physically alter “purportedly authentic US $ 1000 bills” (Goldberg et al., 1996).

Interestingly, in How Just Could a Robot War Be?, Peter Asaro seriously assumes the hypothesis of the “Robot Kleptomaniac,” by envisaging autonomous robots that challenge national sovereignty, produce accidental wars or even make revolutions. In fact, once we admit the existence of a robot that chooses and carries out the criminal action, it necessarily follows that “autonomous technological systems might act in unanticipated ways that are interpreted as acts of war” and, moreover, they may “begin to act on their own intentions and against the intentions of the states who design and use them” (Asaro, 2008). As a result, new types of crime could emerge with robots accountable for their own actions: for example, in Criminal Liability and ‘Smart’ Environments (2010), Mireille Hildebrandt examines a machine that “provides reasons for its behaviours [in that] it has developed second order beliefs about its actions that enable itself as their author.” The self-consciousness of the robot not only materializes Sci-Fi scenarios as imagining a robot revolution and, hence, a new cyber-Spartacus. What is more, in the phrasing of James Moor (1985), the “logical malleability” of robots would end up changing the meaning of traditional notions such as stealing and assaulting, because the culpability of the agent, i.e., its mens rea would be rooted in the artificial mind of a machine “capable of a measure of empathy” and “a type of autonomy that affords intentional actions” (Hildebrandt, 2010). Today’s state-of-the-art in technology, however, suggests to go back to the case of “Picciotto Roboto” rather than insisting on the adventures of “Robot Kleptomaniac.” Although “many authors point out that smart robots already invoke a mutual double anticipation, for instance generating protective feelings for Sony’s robot pet for AIBO” (Hildebrandt, 2010), it seems more profitable to revert to the terra cognita of common legal standpoints that exclude robot criminal-accountability. For the foreseeable future, indeed, robots will be held legally and morally irresponsible because they lack the set of preconditions for attributing liability to someone in the case of violation of criminal laws. Since consciousness is a conceptual prerequisite for both legal and “moral agency” (Himma, 2007), the standard legal viewpoint claims that even when, say, Robbie CX30 assassinated Bart Matthews in Richard Epstein’s story on The Case of the Killer Robot (1997), the homicide remains a matter of human responsibility, because robots are not aware of their own conduct like ‘wishing’ to act in a certain way. Whether the fault is of the Silicon Valley programmer indicted for manslaughter or of the company, Silicon Techtronics, which promised to deliver a safe robot, it would be meaningless to put poor Robbie on trial for murder.

Still, there is no need to evaluate robots with Turing tests so as to admit a new generation of criminal cases involving human (legal and moral) responsibility and even robots’ moral accountability (as in Floridi and Sanders, 2004). In order to highlight this transformation, it is crucial to address the new responsibilities for Picciotto Robotos that participate or are employed in criminal enterprises, in that robots affect standard legal notions as ‘causality’ and human ‘culpability.’ As the field of computer crimes has shown since the first 1990’s, robots induce a “policy vacuum” (Moor, 1985), for the increasing autonomy and even unpredictability of their behaviour alter the conditions on which the principle of human responsibility is traditionally grounded. Some speak of a “failure of causation” due to the impossibility of attributing responsibility on the grounds of “reasonable foreseeability,” since it would be hard to predict what types of harm may supervene (Karnow, 1996). Others stress “strong moral responsibilities” that software programmers and engineers now have for the design of AAAs, i.e., autonomous artificial agents (Grodzinsky, Miller and Wolf, 2008). Besides a new generation of cases, such as a “semiautomatic robotic cannon deployed by the South African army [which] malfunctioned, killing 9 soldiers and wounding 14 others” in October 2007 (Wallach and Allen, 2009), it is necessary to address both legal and ethical issues of this deep transformation, by paying attention to the ways responsibility should be apportioned between designers, producers, and users of increasingly smarter AAAs.

REFERENCES

Asaro, P. (2008,) How just could a robot war be?, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 75, 50-64;

Epstein, R. G. (1997), The case of the killer robot, New York, Wiley;

Floridi, L., and Sanders, J. (2004), On the morality of artificial agents, Minds and Machines, 14(3): 349-379;

Goldberg, K., Paulos, E., Canny, J., Donath, J. and Pauline, N. (1996), Legal tender, ACM SIGGRAPH 96 Visual Proceedings, August 4-9, New York, ACM Press, pp. 43-44;

Grodzinsky, F. S., Miller, K. A., and Wolf, M. J. (2008), The ethics of designing artificial agents, Ethics and Information Technology, 10: 115-121;

Hildebrandt, M. (2010), Criminal liability and ‘smart’ environments, Conference on the Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law at Rutgers-Newark, August 2009;

Himma, K. E. (2007), Artificial agency, consciousness, and the criteria for moral agency: what properties must an artificial agent have to be a moral agent?, 2007 Ethicomp Proceedings, Global e-SCM Research Center & Meiji University, pp. 236-245;

Moor, J. (1985), What is computer ethics?, Metaphilosophy, 16(4): 266-275; Reynolds, C. and Ishikawa M. (2007), Robotic thugs, 2007 Ethicomp Proceedings, Global e-SCM Research Center & Meiji University, pp. 487-492;

Wallach, W. and Allen, C. (2009), Moral machines: teaching robots right from wrong. New York: Oxford University Press.

AUTHOR
Marta Oyaga Serrano

ABSTRACT

When a computer network connects people or organizations it’s a social network. Just as a computer network is a set of machines connected by a set of cables, a social network is a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relations such as friendship, co-working or information exchange. Many researchs about how people use computer-mediated communication (CMC) have concentrated on how individual users interface with their computers, how two persons interact on-line, or how small groups function on-line. As widespread communication via computer networks develops, the analysts need to go beyond studying single users, two-person ties, and small groups to examining the computer-supported social networks (CSSNs) that flourish in areas as different as the workplace and virtual communities. This paper describes the use of the social network approach for understanding the interplay between computer networks, CMC, and social processes.

Social network analysis focuses on patterns of relations among people, organizations, states… and that’s the reason why the analysts try to describe networks of relations as much as possible, the flow of information (and other resources) through them, and discover what effects these relations and networks have on people and organizations.This research approach has rapidly developed in the past twenty years, principally in sociology and communication science. Also, they treat the description of relational patterns as interesting in its own right – e.g., is there a core and periphery?– and examine how involvement in such social networks helps to explain the behavior and attitudes of network members– e.g., do peripheral people send more e-mails and do they feel more involved? They use a variety of techniques to discover a densely-knit clusters and to look for similar role relations. When social network analysts study two-person ties, they interpret their functioning in the light of the two persons’ relations with other network members. This is a quite different approach than the standard CMC assumption that relations can be studied as totally separate units of analysis. “To discover how A, who is in touch with B and C, is affected by the relation between B and C… demands the use of the [social] network concept” [Barnes, 1972, p. 3].

Related with the information about social networks is necessary to say that is gathered by questionnaires, interviews, diaries, observations and more recently through computer monitoring. In both whole and ego-centered network studies of CMC, people are often asked to identify the frequency of communication with others as well as the medium of interaction. Questions may refer to a specific relational content such as “socialize with” or “give advice to” within a given time frame. The most typical question in the studies of communication patterns is thinking about each member of their team and to identify the means of communication for each type of relation. For example, members can give an account of their work communication with each person in unscheduled face-to-face meetings, scheduled face-to-face meetings, by telephone, fax, paper letters or memos, videoconferencing, etcetera.

There are times when the social network itself is the focus of attention. If we term network members egos and alters, then each tie not only gives egos direct access to their alters, but also indirect access to all those network members to whom their alters are connected. Indirect ties link in compound relations (e.g., friend of a friend) that fit network members into larger social systems The social network approach facilitates the study of how information flows through direct and indirect network ties, how people acquire resources and how coalitions and cleavages operate.

Although a good deal of CMC research has investigated group interaction on-line, a group is only one kind of social network, one that is tightly-bound and densely-knit. The whole relations doesn’t fit neatly into tightly-bounded solidarities. Indeed, limiting descriptions to groups and hierarchies oversimplifies the complex social networks that computer networks support.

Because computer networks often are social networks, the social network approach gives important leverage for understanding what goes on in computer-mediated communication: how CMC affects the structure and functioning of social systems (be they organizations, workgroups or friendship circles) and how social structures affect the way computer-mediated communication is used.

Initial studies of computer mediated-communication developed from studies of human-computer interactions. Such studies focused on how individuals interfaced with various forms of “groupware”: software and hardware adapted for computer-mediated communication. The obvious analytic expansion beyond the individual has been to the tie, e.g., how two persons interact through CMC. Not only is this a natural expansion, it is analytically tractable, and it has fit the expertise of those social scientists who have pioneered CMC research: psychologists and psychologically-inclined communication scientists and information scientists.

A need for new ways of analyzing CMC has developed with the spread of computer networks and the realization that social interactions online are not simply scaled-up individuals and ties. Analysts want to know how third parties affect communications, how relations offline affect relations online, and how CMC intersects with the structure and functioning of social systems. For example, have organizations flattened their hierarchy, are virtual communities rebuilding social trust online, and have personal attributes become less relevant on the Internet where “nobody knows you are a dog”. Given the network nature of computer-mediated communication, the social network pproach is a useful way to address such questions.

AUTHOR
Yohko Orito, Eunjin Kim, Yasunori Fukuta and Kiyoshi Murata

ABSTRACT

Since its early stage, B to C e-commerce has been accompanied by the concerns of a wide range of individual users over misuse of their personal information and an invasion of the right to information privacy. Despite the tremendous advancement and widespread availability of security technology to protect the right such as public-key cryptography and the enactment and/or revision of relevant legislation for personal information protection, the concern has still remained to exist in the mind of a broad range of people.

As a way of addressing the concern, a large majority of B to C e-commerce sites post their privacy policies online. It is alleged that online privacy policies function as tools to engender consumers’ trust in online businesses [Doherty, 2001; ECOM, 2008]. It may intuitively be plausible that cultivating customers’ trust in B to C e-commerce companies through publicising privacy policies on their websites is critical for them because of their indispensable collection, storage and use of personal data and of extremely limited opportunities of face-to-face interaction with customers. Simultaneously, if online privacy policies provide individual users with enough information to correctly evaluate trustworthiness of B to C e-commerce sites, individuals can enjoy online shopping without any concern about the violation of their privacy.

However, awareness of the importance of protecting personal information and the right to privacy is inevitably affected by socio-cultural circumstances surrounding B to C e-commerce and any Net-based business necessarily has a global nature. Analysis of the effectiveness of online privacy policies while taking into account local socio-cultural factors and cross-cultural studies on it are thus significant for protection of the right to information privacy and construction of trustworthy B to C e-commerce environment.

In order to undertake this research subject, Orito et al. [2008] conducted a questionnaire survey in April 2008. The 416 valid responses to the survey provided material for a preliminary study of the awareness about online privacy of young Japanese people as customers of B to C e-commerce sites. However, the survey results contained seemingly contradictive responses. For example, more than half of the respondents who acknowledged the importance of online privacy policies when purchasing something online did not actually read the policies very frequently and were not sure if B to C e-commerce companies complied with their own online privacy policies. Even though more than 70% of the respondents answered that they did not know what the right to privacy was, almost all the respondents believed that protection of the right to privacy was “very important” or “important”.

The analysis of these interesting results based on Japanese socio-cultural characteristics reminded the authors of the necessity and importance of taking a step towards cross-cultural studies. In summer 2009, a research project of a comparative study on online privacy between Japan and Republic of Korea was launched. Korea is geographically closed to Japan and has long, complex cultural and historical relationships with the country. The both nations are located in Sinosphere and share the tradition of Confucianism, but Confucian values, culture and customs remain in Korean lifestyles far more strongly than in Japanese ones as shown in Korean people’s respectful attitude towards their elders and the restriction on marriage and adoption based on the rule of Bon-gwan (??; ??). On the other hand, the percentage of Christians including both Catholics and Protestants in the population is nearly 30% (nearly 70% of those who declare their religious affiliation) in Korea, while less than 1% in Japan where most people consider they don’t have any specific religious belief.

After the World War II, Japan achieved a miraculous economic recovery driven chiefly by heavy and chemical industries. While suffering from the after-effects of the collapse of the bubble economy occurred in 1989, the Japanese government adopted a series of “e-Japan” strategies from 2001 designed to prepare the nation for the rapid and drastic changes in socio-economic structure caused by the development and spread of IT and to create an advanced information and telecommunication network society, which resulted in a highly sophisticated broadband network infrastructure throughout the country. Korea, on the other hand, experienced swift economic growth in the 1960s and 70s referred to as the “Miracle on the Han River” during which the two Korean giants, Samsung and Hyundai, laid their foundations. Getting over the “IMF Crisis” in 1997, the Korean government put forth policies to forge an IT nation and promoted the diffusion of the Internet. Consequently, the penetration rate of the Internet has reached nearly 80% in Korea. Although the both countries are now the world’s leading IT nations, the ways of regulating individual users’ online behaviour show a striking contrast between the two nations. For example, in Korea, Net users are legally obligated to use their real names when they post comments on portal sites or media sites to which an average of more than or equal to a hundred thousand users access a day [Chiyohara, 2010]. There is not such regulation in Japan.

Considering the similarities and differences in socio-cultural settings between the two countries, the cross-cultural study promises to provide fruitful findings to the research project. A survey using the questionnaire Orito et al. (2008) developed was conducted at Kyonggi University in Suwon, Korea in May 2010 and collected 205 valid responses.

There were significant differences in responses to the 10 questions out of the 21 questions in the questionnaire between the two samples. For example, the Korean respondents understand the concept of the right to privacy more than the Japanese ones, whereas the Japanese awareness that privacy policies are posted on B to C e-commerce sites was higher than the Korean one. There was no significant difference in recognition of the importance of protecting the right to privacy between the two nations. The survey results are analysed based on socio-cultural characteristics of Japan and Korea to provide useful findings for the advancement of the research, geographical scope of which will be expanded to other regions including European and Islamic countries in the future.

REFERENCES

Chiyohara, R. (2010), Cyber-violence and cyber-contempt, Journal of Information and Management, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 88-98 (in Japanese).

Doherty, S. (2001), Keeping data private. Available online at http://www.networkcomputing.com/1213/1213ws1.html (accessed on 15th July 2009).

Next Generation Electronic Commerce Promotion Council of Japan (ECOM) (2008), Survey on Privacy Policy and Other Similar Statements on Websites (in Japanese). Available online at http://www.ecom.jp/report/guideline_20080826.pdf (accessed on 20th June 2009).

Orito, Y., K. Murata, Y. Fukuta, S. McRobb and A. A. Adams (2008), Online privacy and culture: Evidence from Japan, Proceedings of ETHICOMP 2008, pp. 615-622.

AUTHOR
Amaya Noain Sánchez and Porfirio Barroso Asenjo

ABSTRACT

In the context of Digital Age, all brand new forms of interaction via social media can offer a wide range of chances affecting our daily lives. Computers are changing almost everything in our personal life, business and, by extension, entertainment. Internet and other potent informatics implements make available a diffusion of information like we had never seen before. That is, in fact, a revolution only comparable to Guttembergs’ creation of printing presses. At the same time technological developments generate new opportunities sets of choices that are ultimately positive for humans progress, there is no doubt that these technologies have produced some collateral damages in several ethical aspects. Mason (1986) was summarized ethical issues related to information technology usage by means of an acronym – PAPA (Privacy, Accuracy, Property and Accessibility). Our current research focuses on one of these issues, piracy, and analyses the state of art in Spanish legislation context.

Digitalisation reverting cultural products to the immaterial and the Internet facilitating total automation whereby digital products can be copied infinitely and distributed on a global scale are challenging the prevalent property regime in terms of cultural production fundamentally. The unauthorized downloading and streaming of movies and television shows from the Web is a growing problem for the entertainment industry around the world. Software piracy is globally widespread common practice that costs software manufacturers billions of dollars annually and make authors do not get any benefit for their creations. In a few key countries such as Spain, however, it has become an epidemic that is forcing movie studios to consider no longer selling DVDs in the country. Governments are being pressured into adopting some legislation penalising copyright infringers and, in the Spanish case, new controversial regulation allow collapsing web pages with filesharing and prohibits Internet access to users downloading digital copyright protected content without paying. Unlike in the U.S., France and, under proposed legislation, Britain, piracy is not against the law in Spain unless it is done for profit. The country’s minister of culture, a former filmmaker who is backing a bill that would make it easier to shut off access to websites that facilitate piracy, blames the problem on deep-rooted cultural attitudes.

The proposed law would reverse, in effect, the burden of proof, empowering a new commission to shut down suspect Web sites pending the outcome of any court appeal. However, the number of creators and IS professional thinking about the inefficient of these laws is increasing at the same time they demand new strategies of content producers. Legitimate digital distribution is not filling the gap. Apple Inc.’s iTunes, the world’s biggest digital-media store, does not sell movies or television shows in Spain, as it does in Britain, France and Germany. On the other hand, users feel they are being treated as a continuous guilty when, every time they buy any digital storage device, they have to pay a digital canon in order to support this damage produced by the piracy acts, even also we have no intention to break any property right.

Metodology: Our methodology is a quantitative research on the current measures took in the last years in Spain in order to combat piracy. To accomplish this task, the chosen material could be no other than this mentioned legal text and the reactions published by mass media of the main actorss of this conflic: creators, produccers, distributors, consumers and internet asociations. Content work that would allow us to extract the main complains advantages and shortcomings of these measures and the point of view of a wide range of actors involved.

Findings: regulation of digital content has arrised new generations of problems difficult to solve with ancient property rules. Sometimes creators temselves are totally contrary to the use of some measures involving penalize downloading creative content and renounce voluntarily to their rights. Public opinion in Spain support this attitudes and feel property legislation an inefficient law that helps to limit their access rights.

Research limitation/implication: Although our research is limited to an analysis of ethical implication of piracy, and sumarised the dilemma of an ancient and inoperative model of controling piracy in the specific context of Spanish legislation, we consider that this study will be very useful. We hope conference directors, programmer committee, presenters and finally, people interested in solve the dilemma between piracy and property rights, find this work profitable. We offer also a complete framework of study of ownership and regulation in Spain that can be used to make a comparision with the current situation of piracy in others countries.

Practical implications: This document aims to call the attention to the need of discussing what the useful ways to combat piracy and softwary coping are, reconciling rights of users and content creaters.

Originality/value: The paper contributes to know and show, nowadays, what is the state of this ethical dilema in Spanish country.

REFERENCES

1. Barroso Porfirio (2007) Ética y Deontología Informática. Editorial Fragua, Madrid, 134 pages.

2. Barroso Porfirio and Gonzalez Mario (2009) Education On Informatics Ethics: A Challenge To Social Development (Abstract presented and appraoved to ETHICOMP 2010).

3. Mason Richard O. (1986). Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age. Management Information Systems Quarterly, Volume 10, Number 1, 5–12.

4. Ministerio de Cultura de España. http://www.mcu.es/ (last access: 1/02/2011).

AUTHOR
Ekaterina Netchitailova

ABSTRACT

Facebook is a new media environment where the collapse of contexts and the presence of a potentially wide audience asks for a careful examination of one’s performance and behaviour on Facebook. On Facebook people can have different audiences which, otherwise, are separated in real life (like colleagues, friends and family) and it can be tricky, since when users create their profiles or post something on Facebook they need to be aware that their audience is quite diversified.

Danah Boyd calls Facebook a networked public, which according to her is 1) the space constructed through networked technologies and 2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the interaction of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics, according to Boyd, “support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways.” (Boyd D., 2010, p. 1)

Boyd argues that in networked contexts information which was not supposed to be public can become public due to the properties of the network. “This stems from the ways in which networked media, like broadcast media…, blurs public and private in complicated ways. For those in the spotlight, broadcast media often appeared to destroy privacy. This is most visible through the way tabloid media complicated the private lives of celebrities, feeding on people’s desire to get backstage access…As networked publics brought the dynamics of broadcast media to everyday people, similar dynamics emerged…” (Boyd D., 2010, p. 39)

Boyd distinguishes four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability, and three dynamics, – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts and the blurring of public and private , which characterise the networked publics.

Persistence means that online expressions are automatically recorded and archived. Replicability means that the content made out of bits can be duplicated. Scalability means that the potential visibility of content in networked publics is big and searchability means that the content in networked publics can be accessed through search.

These characteristics together with three dynamics mean that what is posted on Facebook can be accessed by a large public and stay around for future visibility. This can cause serious issues for privacy, as well as for one’s own behaviour on Facebook, as people often forget about a potentially wide audience on Facebook while posting something on it.

Thus, Facebook pauses new questions about privacy and about one’s behaviour in public. Facebook is a semi-public space, and even if one limits the amount of friends or who has an access to a profile, the content of one’s profile can still potentially be open to a larger public. We behave differently in public and in private, while at work or at home, among friends or colleagues. Facebook potentially mixes the two environments and creates a new social context, a new semi-public space, where new rules of behaviour and performance emerge.

Erving Goffman in ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ talks about human behaviour as a performance, defined as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers.” (Goffman E., 1959, p. 32)

According to Goffman our behaviour is determined by a social context. We behave differently in different social situations.

Meyrowitz argues that electronic media, especially television, have led to the overlapping of many social contexts which previously were distinct.

Thus, Meyrowitz argues that before electronic media there were sharp distinctions between ‘onstage’ and ‘backstage’ behaviours. But ‘by bringing many different types of people to the same ‘place’, electronic media have fostered a blurring of many formerly distinct social roles. Electronic media affect us, then not primary through their content, but by changing the ‘situational geography’ of social life.” (Meyrowitz J., 1986, p. 6)

The merging of situations leads to a new behaviour, which Meyrowitz calls middle region. The middle region behaviour arises when audience members get a ‘sidestage’ view. They see parts of the traditional backstage area together with parts of the traditional onstage behaviour, and see the performer move from backstage to onstage. An example of middle region behaviour is when children stay long enough with the parents. Parents do not usually discuss such topics as death, sex or money in front of the children, but if the children stay present at an adult party, parents might start discuss adult topics in front of them, while avoiding the explicitness characteristic of an adult party. The longer children stay with the parents, more likely they are to see the childish side of adults.

Middle region behaviour is the behaviour that results from the merger of previously distinct situations, and electronic media, according to Meyrowitz is the primary cause for the creation of a middle region. Television, for instance, has led to the fact that more and more people would have a glimpse of a private life of celebrities and politicians, which would adapt their behaviour because their private life was more exposed to the general public.

Meyrowitz wrote his book before the advance of the Internet, but his definition of a middle region can easily be applied to Facebook. As mentioned previously, Facebook is a semi-public space, where distinct social contexts merge together. Facebook behaviour can be called middle region behaviour where we have to handle the fact that colleagues and friends alike can see what we post. Even if one chooses only to include very close friends into one’s social network, the semi-public profile of Facebook means that one has to think carefully about the implications of Facebook performance.

Based on the interviews with 19 participants and observations on Facebook this paper tries to see how people negotiate the collapsing of contexts on Facebook.

AUTHOR
Miranda Mowbray

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses an issue that may arise from the combination of the accelerating growth in the number of pervasive computing devices, and the continued rise of social computing, in particular microblogging. The issue is unwanted friend requests from inanimate objects.

A Twitter user who wants to be sent in real time the tweets published by another Twitter user’s account, or to read private messages sent by that account, must first send a friend request to the account. The act of sending a friend request to a user’s account is also known as “adding” the user. A tweet sent by Eugene Huo said:

Man, I gotta watch what I talk about on twitter… as soon as you mention something they find you… a rice cooker just added me.

It was probably a company advertising rice cookers rather than an actual rice cooker that added Eugene Huo, but in the future it might well be a rice cooker. Pervasive computing devices are already using Twitter as a communication channel, in growing numbers. Everyday objects that tweet include a toaster (@mytoaster), a garage door (@connectedthings), shoes (@ramblershoes), ovens (@bakertweet), a house (@ckhome), and a catflap (@GusAndPenny). There is a home security system that sends public tweets about which doors are open – this is perhaps not a good idea.

Most of these objects send out data on Twitter but do not receive it. However, Twitter offers an easy-to-use channel through which pervasive computing devices can receive data as well as transmit it. Pervasive computing devices on Twitter may be able to gather useful information from other devices and from human tweeters, including tweeters who are strangers to the owner of the device. The potential of such information is demonstrated by the fact that measures based on human Twitter activity have been found to predict the result of the most recent UK general election and box-office takings for Hollywood films better than the previous best prediction methods. Information from human tweeters can form a rapid and flexible service in emergencies. Company service representatives are already using Twitter by following customers and other users who tweet words connecting to their brands, and responding to any complaints: in the future these companies’ products themselves might use Twitter or other social networks to automatically mine real-time information from customers that could be used to enhance the service provided by the product, or proactively solve problems.

Moreover, the Twitter interface offers an intuitive way for human users (especially remote users) to interact with a service. A playful example of this is @tweet_tree, a Christmas tree whose lights change colour according to commands sent to it by Twitter users. Other automated Twitter accounts have looked up stock prices, announced the football results for a user’s favourite team, or played games with users. In these cases the user controls the automated account by sending it “direct messages”, which are private one-to-one messages that can be sent by a Twitter user to any of her followers.

This raises the spectre of human users being bombarded with friend requests from inanimate objects with embedded computing systems, where the owners or manufacturers of these objects wish the objects to receive potentially useful information from the human users in real time, or wish to enable and encourage the users to interact with the objects via direct messages. In fact unwanted friend requests are already a problem on Twitter, because the most common Twitter spamming technique involves automatically sending friend requests to a very large number of users. A user who accepts and reciprocates such a request may find herself receiving unwanted communications from an automated account – whether this is the Twitter account of an inanimate object, or a spammer, or even both at once. Or her private tweets may be automatically harvested and used in ways that she does not wish. But even if she refuses every one of these requests, receiving very frequent friend requests can be annoying in itself. It may also lead to the user mistakenly refusing requests from some people (or objects) that she would in fact like to be friends with on Twitter.

To address this, some form of validation service is needed to help users decide whether a requesting account is likely to be one that they wish to communicate with, and to enable them to automatically refuse or accept requests from some classes of accounts. Several Twitter validation services, most of which have the aim of identifying spamming accounts, are currently available. Unfortunately they have some limitations, the most common being that their accuracy could be undermined by changes in popular software for automated Twitter accounts. This limitation is shared by some measures for spammer identification suggested in papers by Lee et al. and Stringhini et al. Indeed, several of the measures used by account validation services are unable to distinguish benign Twitter accounts from automated accounts that operate some types of spamming software in current use. One particularly interesting service, TrueTwit Basic, uses a CAPTCHA challenge to attempt to discover whether or not an account is automated, under the assumption that human users do not generally wish to grant a friend request from an automated Twitter account. But this assumption may become decreasingly valid as useful pervasive computing services move to Twitter.

In addition to pointing out limitations, this paper identifies some useful features of several validation services that might contribute to a more robust solution. If we cannot resolve this issue we may find ourselves befriended by hundreds of rice cookers.