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AbstractWhile people are increasingly dependent on tech companies to live a flourishing life, numerous incidents reveal that these companies struggle with genuinely taking the interests of customers to heart. Regulators and companies alike acknowledge that this should change and that companies must take responsibility for their impact. If society is to benefit from these innovations, it is paramount that tech companies are trustworthy. However, it is unclear what is required of tech companies to be recognized as trustworthy. This vagueness is risky, as it may lead to ethics washing and an ill-founded sense of security. This raises the question: what should tech companies do to deserve our trust? What would make them trustworthy? This article critically analyzes the philosophical debate on trustworthiness to develop a trustworthiness account for tech companies. It concludes that for tech companies to be trustworthy they need to actively signal their trustworthiness through the design of their applications (1), nurture techno-moral competences and practical wisdom in tech employees (2) and go beyond legal compliance (3).

Human beings are technical beings. From the clothes we wear to the spaceships we fire into the sky, all these technologies are developed with the aim to protect ourselves, improve ourselves, and control the fickle world in which we live. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that when hit with one of the biggest health crises of the last century, all over the world, governments have turned to technology to contain this life-threatening event. Most of these proposed—or already developed—technological solutions are data-driven. Just as the turn to technology to solve this crisis does not come as a surprise, neither does the protest it has caused. Critical citizens and civil rights organizations worry about the possibility of personal data being shared with private parties, about governments ending up using the collected information against citizens, and they fear an overall loss of privacy and freedom if these applications became widely used. Overall, they suspect that what is introduced as a temporary instrument to counter this crisis will have long-lasting effects on society.

AbstractBlockchain is employed as a technology holding a solutionist promise, while at the same time, it is hard for the promissory blockchain applications to become realized. Not only is the blockchain protocol itself not foolproof, but when we move from "blockchain in general" to "blockchain in particular," we see that new governance structures and ways of collaborating need to be developed to make blockchain applicationswork/becomereal. The qualities ascribed to (blockchain) technologyin abstractoare not to be taken for granted in blockchain applicationsin concreto. The problem of trust, therefore, does not become redundant simply through the employment of "trustless" blockchain technology. Rather, on different levels, new trust relations have to be constituted. In this article, we argue that blockchain is aproductiveforce, even if it does not solve the problem of trust, and sometimes regardless of blockchain technology not implemented after all. The values that underpin this seemingly "trustless technology" such ascontrol,efficiency, andprivacyand the story that is told about these values co‐shape the actions of stakeholders and, to a certain extent, pre‐sort the path of application development. We will illustrate this by presenting a case study on theRed Button(De Rode Knop), a Dutch pilot to develop a blockchain‐based solution that enables people who are in debt to communicate to their creditors that they are, together with the municipality, working on improving their situation, thereby requesting a temporary suspension from debt collection.

This article focuses on the smart city as a political place. It analyses how both the technologies and the ideas smart cities are built on, oust trust and the rule of law as two important conditions for the city as a thriving political community. In particular, three challenges to the city as a political place are identified: de-subjectivation, invisibility, and a neo-liberal value shift. In order to address these challenges, we introduce the term 'negotiation' as a new guiding principle to the use of smart technologies in cities. Through negotiation, we underline some necessary steps to re-subjectify citizens and to put the acceptance of vulnerability and transparency at the centre of our thinking and evaluation of the smart city. This article concludes that the current focus on participation and citizen-centric smart city projects is not sufficient to build and contribute to a genuine political community and that a re-evaluation of active citizenship in the smart city context is therefore needed.

Abstract
Fiduciary agents and trust-based institutions are increasingly proposed and considered in legal, regulatory, and ethical discourse as an alternative or addition to a control-based model of data management. Instead of leaving it up to the citizen to decide what to do with her data and to ensure that her best interests are met, an independent person or organization will act on her behalf, potentially also taking into account the general interest. By ensuring that these interests are protected, the hope is that citizens' willingness to share data will increase, thereby allowing for more data-driven projects. Thus, trust-based models are presented as a win–win scenario. It is clear, however, that there are also apparent dangers entailed with trust-based approaches. Especially one model, that of data trusts, may have far-reaching consequences.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Summary -- Part I. Introduction and Context -- Part II. Empirical Analysis -- Part III. Analysis and Recommendations -- Afterword: iGovernment and iSociety -- Abbreviations and acronyms -- References -- List of interviewees

This white paper assesses privacy-preserving technologies taking ethical and societal issues into account. The assessment consists of two parts: a technology-specific assessment of selected classes of technologies and a more general assessment of the technologies. Among the assessed technologies are technologies for anonymisation and sanitisation, encryption, multi-party computation, access control, policy enforcement, accountability and transparency, data provenance, and access, portability and user control. With respect to the issues, the focus is on privacy but issues and values such as self-determination, welfare interdependency, trustworthiness, accountability, fairness and legislation are also taken into account.