Every individual should be able to securely participate in a digital first society; there are no ‘wrong kind of leaves’. While usable security has contributed significantly to bring humans to the centre of systems design, quantitative evaluation of preferences cannot fully capture diverse individual needs. The Bristol Cyber Security Group took a lead and proposed the adoption of Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a framework to capture human needs and feed that back into systems provisioning efforts.
RISCS, in keeping with its focus on people, process and technology, has been actively supporting this new strand of thinking in the context of cyber security. We organised an invitation only workshop to explore the impact of poverty and capability inter-relating in this context. The theme of the workshop was not restricted, yet as a starting point of the discussions we identified the following themes:
- How does financial poverty relate to digital privacy and security poverty?
- Can a Capability Approach help us identify and map this kind of digital privacy and security poverty, and measure the impacts it has on people’s lives?
- How can (1) system developers and (2) policy makers use the data collected using a Capability Approach to make better systems and better policies?
We were glad to have academics from various universities around the UK and members from the National Cyber Security Centre participate in the daylong event held in Bristol. The session started with Professor Genevieve Liveley outlining the role of RISCS, and Dr. Partha Das Chowdhury outlining the context and theme of the workshop. This was followed by engaging keynotes by Professor Michael Goldsmith (Oxford), Ms. Ahana Dutta (UCL), Dr. Ann Kristin Glenster (Cambridge), Professor Awais Rashid (Bristol) and the National Cyber Security Centre, UK. The programme was structured to allow sufficient room for discussion among the participants in small groups. In keeping with the spirit of the capability approach, plural formulations of poverty emerged during the discussions along with conversations on who is responsible for implementing the approach.
We plan to take these discussions forward in the form of special issues, follow-up workshops and community engagement. Please watch this space.
Please find the workshop presentation slides below:
- ‘Security & Privacy for Whom?’ by Partha Das Chowdhury (University of Bristol)
- ‘Financial Poverty, Digital Surveillance, and the Capabilities Approach’ by Ann Kristin Glenster (Minderoo Centre, Cambridge)
- ‘The Collective Action Problem of Digital Privacy and Security’ by Ahana Dutta (UCL)
- ‘Poverty, Privacy and Power: Decades in the Long Journey to Cybersecurity and Empowerment’ by Michael Goldsmith (University of Oxford)
December 2024