The Nordic Centre for Internet and Society’s Christoph Lutz attended the meeting of the COST Action Good Brother: Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications on the 9th and 10th of September in Alicante, Spain. The aim of Good Brother is to “increase the awareness on the ethical, legal, and privacy issues associated to audio- and video-based monitoring and to propose privacy-aware working solutions for assisted living, by creating an interdisciplinary community of researchers and industrial partners from different fields (computing, engineering, healthcare, law, sociology) and other stakeholders (users, policy makers, public services), stimulating new research and innovation” (https://goodbrother.eu/).
The meeting convened about 25 scholars from different disciplines (e.g., computer science, law, psychology, sociology, media and communication) across Europe and was intended to foster interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and collaboration on the topic of the COST Action, which is Active and Assisted Living (AAL), being technologies and services that aim to improve quality of life and support independent and healthy living of older and frail people. This was the first in-person meeting of the COST Action and it was held in a hybrid form, allowing participants who couldn’t make it in person to join.
The first output of the Action will be a white paper on the ethical, legal and social aspects of AAL and will be published shortly. Christoph Lutz is particularly involved in working group 1, which centers around analyzing the ethical, legal, data protection and privacy issues linked to the use of cameras and microphones in private spaces, and how to manage multiparty privacy preferences. Additionally, the working group will be studying the different perceptions of these issues according to gender and cultural/societal background.
Image Credit: University of Alicante and Good Brother Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/GoodBrotherCOST/status/1438846515385090053