Cybersecurity, Ethics and Collective Responsibility

This talk introduces a new book by Seumas Miller and Terry Bossomaier: Cybersecurity, Ethics and Collective Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2024).

The advent of the Internet, exponential growth in computing power, and rapid developments in artificial intelligence have raised numerous cybersecurity-related ethical questions in various domains. The dual use character of cybertechnology-that it can be used to provide great benefits to humankind but can also do great harm-means that business (data security, data ownership and privacy), public communication (disinformation and computational propaganda), health (privacy, ransomware attacks), law enforcement (data security, predictive policing) and interstate conflict (cyberwar, autonomous weapons) are of vital interest to cybersecurity ethics. A central theoretical and practical problem addressed in this book and in this talk is that of our collective responsibility for the collective good of cybersecurity.