Civic Hacking for the Right to Know and the Right to Privacy

Abstract

The involvement of civic hackers in national and international crisis mitigation efforts as digital first responders has been widely discussed (Palen et al., 2010). Crisis events often cause civic hackers to break ethical boundaries and governance structures during crisis events as they attempt to communicate essential information to the public (Crawford and Finn, 2015), raising questions regarding ethical concerns, sustainability of their projects, and power dynamics with other entities. Interestingly, this is often at odds with their ethical standards which advocate for the right to privacy against government oversharing of data. Thus, in order to develop better standards of practice for civic hackers in crisis mitigation, it is important to understand the ethical dilemmas that they face. This research focuses on South Korean civic hacking activities during the crisis of COVID-19. Two groups of civic hackers were interviewed and surveyed; 1) those mapping government data and 2) those advocating for improvement in the delivery and dissemination of government data. Through interviews of these two groups, this research study found that although civic hackers struggled to determine ethical data practices, the limited efficacy of their projects due to technical difficulties and lack of community power discouraged them to further sustain the civic hacking projects, which limited the social impact of their work. The study provides an insiders’ view of civic hacking for crisis mitigation that can help inform policy for ethical practices in the delivery and use of data during a crisis event.