The Kiroshi Foundation has awarded the Faculty of Philosophy a research grant of ¥41.2 million, about £250,000, for a three-year project on consent and the people seen by head-worn cameras and optical implants. The project, Whose view is it? Consent, bystanders and the ethics of seeing through a device, begins on 1 October.
It will be led by Professor Judith Demery, with Dr Piotr Zawadzki of the Faculty of Law, and will be the founding project of a new Centre for the Ethics of Perception in the Faculty. The team will test devices on sale in staged scenes with volunteers, read what their makers say about what they keep, and survey the law on recording by worn and implanted cameras in at least a dozen countries, working with researchers at the Foundation’s Chiba Centre for Visual Science.
“A camera on a lamp post is regulated, signposted and argued about,” said Professor Demery. “A camera in someone’s eye is regulated as a medical device, if at all. Nobody has asked the people it looks at what they think, and we want to start.”