Social Computing and the Law

Khurshid Ahmad is Professor of Computer Science at Trinity College, Dublin. He specializes in artificial intelligence with research interests in information extraction from images and texts, fuzzy logic, sentiment analysis, neural networks, and terminology and ontology. Ahmad holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the University of Surrey (1975). He is an elected Fellow of the British Computer Society and of Trinity College, as well as a Chartered Engineer. He has taught at the Universities of Karachi and Surrey and has been a Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Ahmad has published over 250 research papers. His books include Computers, Language Learning and Language Teaching (Cambridge, 1985), Translator's Workbench: Tools and Terminology for Translation and Text Processing (1995), and Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis: Emotion, Metaphor, and Terminology (2011).

1. Introduction; 1.1. A note on terminology; 1.2. Security, privacy, and dignity during an emergency; 1.3. Our contribution: disasters, technology, law and ethics; 1.4. Structure of the book; 2. Social computing systems and ethical considerations; 2.1. Introduction; 2.2. Key ethical challenges posed by social computing systems; 2.3. Technology mediated protection of data and persons; 2.4. Conclusion; 3. Internet laws; 3.1. Introduction; 3.2. Internet governance systems: self-regulation, technical regulation and governmental regulation; 3.3. Ownership of personal data harvested from social computing systems; 3.4. Protection for monitoring and harvesting information on social media; 3.5. Summary findings; 4. Copyright law and data protection law; 4.1. Introduction; 4.2. EU copyright directives and German copyright law; 4.3. The ontology of copyright; 4.4. Copyright and exceptional circumstances: disaster management; 4.5. Exceptions and limitations; 4.6. Summary; 5. EU human rights framework; 5.1. Introduction; 5.2. Approach; 5.3. Disaster management and human rights; 5.4. EU fundamental rights framework and disaster management; 5.5. Conclusion; 6. Conclusion: legally using social computing streams and privacy protection; 6.1. Introduction; 6.2. Social computing analysis in exceptional circumstances; 6.3. Checklist of legal issues; 6.4. Risk analysis; 6.5. Conclusion.