Cybersecurity Issues in Crowdsourcing Engineering Initiatives
Donna M. Schaeffer, Jillian Drake · 2024
As crowdsourced and open innovation engineering-related projects become more widespread and globally orientated, we must pay attention to cybersecurity issues that can emerge.The sharing of data and personally identifiable information are fundamental aspects of crowdsourcing and open innovation initiatives, necessitating the evaluation of the cybersecurity concerns of user privacy, data confidentiality, data integrity and system availability.Lapses within any area of the cybersecurity realm can result in damages to reputation, cause for legal damage or regulatory action.Governance of crowdsourced projects must include attention to both ethical considerations, as well as cybersecurity issues, regardless of their scope and scale.The exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities are often result from ethical omissions or oversights.Just as engineers respect engineering professional ethics, so must citizens who participate in crowdsourcing or open innovation endeavors which solicit, gather or process data.Taxonomies provide a useful mechanism to understand and classify various social or technical phenomenon.In this paper, we will share a taxonomy that identifies how professional engineering ethics are represented and brought to life in 21 st century crowdsourced engineering projects, which include commercial and research efforts from Dell Technologies, Ennomotive, Innocentive, IDEO, Digital Humanitarian Network, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and the United States' government Challenge.govinitiative.