Computer Ethics—Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) 2019

CEPE (Computer Ethics—Philosophical Enquiry) is a leading international conference and has played a significant role in defining the field since its first event in 1997. CEPE is held biennially, and is organized by INSEIT (the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology). For CEPE 2019, the conference theme will be Risk and Cybersecurity. 

Risk and Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is of pressing and ever-expanding importance to governments, organizations, and individuals as ever more of our lives becomes digitally rendered, analyzed, manipulated, and stored. Even as cybersecurity issues present threats to us both individually and collectively, cybersecuritization—the political action of consolidating power and control through rhetorics of “cybersecurity”—threatens people and peoples in different ways.

Risk is central to computer ethics in numerous other ways as well. Risk abounds online as we figure out how to negotiate and protect identities that are increasingly visible across many parts of our lives, to persons but to companies and algorithms as well. Risk has always been central to engineering ethics, and computer ethics continues to negotiate shifting boundaries of the morality of whistleblowing along with changes in the economic, social, legal, and human costs of a hacked database. These issues are complicated further by innovations in robotics and the internet of things, which spread risk across what once was an online/offline boundary and into the smallest cracks of our lives, from military and domestic robots, to smart cities and smart homes, and to the digital assistants and baby monitors in our kitchens and bedrooms.