CPDP Conference Who is Who

Name: Margit SUTROP

Affiliation: Tartu University in Estonia (EE)

Short BIO

Margit Sutrop is Professor of practical philosophy, Head of the Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, and the founding Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics at Tartu University in Estonia. Her current research interests are ethics of technology, bioethics, research ethics, moral and political philosophy.

She has written more than 60 articles and books and edited 14 volumes. Recent publications include articles on biometrics in Review of Policy Research and on ethical frameworks of new technologies in Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics and Journal of Internal Medicine.

She has worked for the European Commission as an expert in ethics of science since 2004. She is also a member of several advisory boards of the EC FP7 projects advising. She is currently involved in three 7th FP projects and is coordinating three big local research grants on pluralism, relativism and values development.

CPDP Conference 2012 presentation

The value of privacy and dealing with value conflicts

In this presentation I am going to deal with potential value conflicts such as between privacy and security. I will argue that since privacy derives its value from other sources, enabling autonomy, freedom, human dignity, trust etc, one should take this into account when considering

violations of privacy for protecting our security. If in specific situations it is indeed necessary to restrict our privacy, one has to think of other ways of securing our individual autonomy, public trust etc. I will bring an example of the second generation biometrics technologies used for surveillance purposes focusing on behavioral patterns with the aim of predicting suspicious behavior or hostile intentions.