Ethical issues in tracking cellular telephones at an event

Abstract

Early in 2007, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) conducted an experiment to track the cellular telephones of a small group of people as they moved to and from an event, to test the viability of using such tracking to provide the participants with useful traffic information. This project raised a number of ethical issues, which prompted this paper and which are discussed in this paper. These include: •The ethics of modelling data, including the treatment of research participants; •Privacy and surveillance issues related to tracking the movement of people; •The risks inherent in being tracked vs the benefits of being tracked; and •The ethics related to sending messages to drivers The authors have reviewed the literature on ethics and used the results to assemble a check list of relevant ethical issues, adding a view of their own (i.e. a deontological ethics approach), against which the conduct of this research project was assessed. The authors also provide an overview of the experiment and the results obtained.