I am just beginning to get started with looking at ethical issues around the sort of work we all do, to try and alleviate some of the niggling feeling I get when hearing what wonderful pervasive stuff is being developed. Having worked quite extensively with young people in a variety of settings over the past few years, I am aware of child-protection issues around research work, such as how to avoid identifying them when publishing research data. Working with any sort of GPS enabled software also adds the possibility of exposing the different locations that the young people frequent, which could inadvertently make them vulnerable. Producers of pervasive media, whether research projects or consumer applications, need to be sure that they themselves understand the implications of what they are designing, and what personal information is being exposed.

Of course, this is also true of any adults that are using the software, but often it is assumed that people over the age of 18 realise the implications of using applications that expose their personal information, even though most would not be aware of the data they are inadvertently generating about themselves.

So, I convened a session at pmstudio with a group of interested people, we had a lively and fairly wide-ranging discussion (some notes here) and will be meeting on a monthly basis in 2009, with each session kicking off with a presentation by someone on a project or issue of interest. The plan is to organise a symposium in July at pmstudio, to widen the circle of interested people.