5.8: Key Terms

Useful Concepts 

• Algorithmic Accountability: The obligation to ensure that automated decision-making systems are transparent, explainable, and subject to oversight, including mechanisms to identify, contest, and correct harms caused by algorithmic decisions.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): Computational systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, including learning, prediction, decision-making, and pattern recognition, often trained on large datasets.
• Biometric Surveillance: The use of biological identifiers such as facial recognition, fingerprints, or iris scans to monitor, identify, and track individuals, often raising concerns about privacy, consent, and misuse.
• COM-B Framework: A behavioral model emphasizing that effective action requires Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation; used to analyze how individuals and institutions engage with digital systems and governance.
• Cyber-Sovereignty: The principle that states have the authority to regulate and control internet activity within their borders, including data flows, content, and digital infrastructure.
• Data Colonialism: A system in which data generated by individuals and communities, often in the Global South, is extracted and monetized by powerful corporations or states, mirroring historical patterns of resource exploitation.
• Data Justice: A framework emphasizing fairness, equity, and accountability in how data is collected, used, and governed, with attention to power imbalances and social impact.
• Design Justice: A community-centered approach to technology design that prioritizes the needs, voices, and experiences of marginalized groups to ensure equitable and inclusive outcomes.
• Digital Divide: Inequalities in access to digital technologies, as well as disparities in digital literacy, affordability, and meaningful participation in digital society.
• Digital Geneva Convention: A proposed international framework to establish norms and protections in cyberspace, particularly to safeguard civilians and critical infrastructure during cyber conflict.
• Digital Literacy (Civic Literacy): The ability to critically understand, evaluate, and engage with digital technologies, including awareness of algorithms, misinformation, privacy, and power structures shaping online environments.
• Digital Political Economy: An analytical framework examining how value, labor, and power are distributed within digital systems, including issues of data extraction, platform monopolies, and global inequality.
• Digital Self-Determination: The principle that individuals and communities should have control over how their data is collected, used, and governed, extending traditional notions of autonomy into the digital realm.
• Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA): A framework for policy and governance that ensures technologies and systems respect, protect, and fulfill human rights, emphasizing participation, accountability, and equity.
• Metaverse Governance: The emerging challenge of regulating virtual environments where users interact socially and economically, raising questions about identity, ownership, jurisdiction, and rights.
• Neuro-Rights: Protections designed to safeguard mental privacy, cognitive autonomy, and the integrity of human thought in the context of brain-computer interfaces and neurotechnology.
• Polycentric Governance: A system of governance in which multiple, overlapping authorities operate at different levels (local, national, global), enabling flexible and collaborative decision-making.
• Right to Explanation: The legal and ethical entitlement of individuals to understand how automated systems make decisions that affect their lives, particularly in high-stakes contexts.
• Splinternet: The fragmentation of the global internet into separate, regionally or nationally controlled networks with differing rules, access, and governance models.
• Surveillance Capitalism: An economic system in which human experience is commodified through data extraction, enabling corporations to predict and influence behavior for profit (Zuboff, 2019).
• Techno-Authoritarianism (Digital Authoritarianism): The use of digital technologies, including AI and surveillance systems, by governments to monitor populations, control information, and suppress dissent.