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Research

Value-based Engineering for ethics by Design

Value-based Engineering (VbE) is a new and highly practical approach to human-centered engineering. It makes organizations aware of the ethical challenges in their IT systems and allows them to change the narrative of their IT innovations towards more social wellbeing. It provides a structured and transparent method to ensure that technical units work towards stakeholder value.

Research Focus - Ethical Behavior of Engineers

In a long-term research endeavor we have been investigating the ethical behavior of software- and system engineers. Against the background of real ethical problems in engineering organizations as well as an earlier interview study of questionable privacy attitudes of engineers, we wanted to know about what is really happening in engineering organizations.

Privacy by Design & Personal Data Markets

The Institute has a long tradition in privacy research and some major third-party funded projects are currently conducted in this domain; including the SPECIAL project and the Privacy & US Project. The Institute also co-founded the Privacy & Sustainable Computing Lab that is headed by Dr. Ben Wagner and is co-operating with many Institutes inside and outside WU to strengthen this area of research. Professor Spiekermann in particular has worked on Privacy Impact Assessments and Privacy by Design in the past.

Privacy Behavior

Our empirical research on disclosure behavior has seen various foci over the years. Prof. Spiekermann originally started to work on privacy in 2001 when discovering the Privacy Paradox during her Ph.D. Since then she has focused – especially in co-operation with Jana Korunovska - on interface entropy in users’ disclosure behavior as well as users’ challenges in processing privacy notices. Also peoples’ valuation of their personal data has been an important research stream in the past years.

Attention as a Valuable Resource

In 2015 Jana Korunovska, Kathrin Bednar and Sarah Spiekermann started working on attention as a resource. Earlier work of Prof. Spiekermann with Prof. Alessandro Acquisti (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) preceded this effort to understand the effects of interruptions on peoples’ online purchase behavior. Since then the emphasis in this work has shifted and we have started working on how peoples’ attention is compromised when using digital systems.

Publikationen

Publikationen (>> PURE)

Projekte (>> PURE)