Touching at a Distance: Digital Intimacies, Haptic Platforms, and the Ethics of Consent

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Abstract

The last decade has seen rise in technologies that allow humans to send and receive intimate touch across long distances. Drawing together platform studies, digital intimacy studies, phenomenology of touch, and ethics of technology, we argue that these new haptic communication devices require specific ethical consideration of consent. The paper describes several technologies, including Kiiroo teledildonics, the Kissenger, the Apple Watch, and Hey Bracelet, highlighting how the sense of touch is used in marketing to evoke a feeling of connection within the digital sphere. We then discuss the ambiguity of skin-to-skin touch and how it is further complicated in digital touch by remediation through platforms, companies, developers, manufacturers, cloud storage sites, the collection and use of data, research, satellites, and the internet. Lastly, we raise concerns about how consent of data collection and physical consent between users will be determined, draw on examples in virtual reality and sex-robotics, and ultimately arguing for further interdisciplinary research into this area.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Madelaine Ley: m.j.ley@tudelft.nl

Nathan Rambukkana: nrambukkana@wlu.ca

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Eng Ethics

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Eng Ethics

Title: Science and Engineering Ethics

Publisher: Springer Netherlands (Dordrecht )

ISSN (Print): 1353-3452

ISSN (Electronic): 1471-5546

Publication date (Electronic): 21 September 2021

Publication date PMC-release: 21 September 2021

Publication date (Print): 2021

Volume: 27

Issue: 5

Electronic Location Identifier: 63

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.5292.c, ISNI 0000 0001 2097 4740, Ethics/Philosophy Section, Department of Values, Technology and Innovation, Faculty of Technology, Management and Policy, , Delft University of Technology, ; Delft, Netherlands

[2 ]GRID grid.268252.9, ISNI 0000 0001 1958 9263, Communication Studies, Faculty of Arts, , Wilfrid Laurier University, ; Waterloo, Canada

Article

Publisher ID: 338

DOI: 10.1007/s11948-021-00338-1

PMC ID: 8454010

PubMed ID: 34546467

SO-VID: 83daedbb-594f-4060-9894-6c4ad19e77c8

License:

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date received : 7 December 2020

Date accepted : 18 August 2021

Funding

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000155, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada;

Award ID: 430-2018-00073

Award Recipient : Nathan Rambukkana

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Ethics

Keywords: ethics of technology,haptics,digital intimacy,platform studies,communication technologies,teledildonics

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Ethics

Keywords: ethics of technology, haptics, digital intimacy, platform studies, communication technologies, teledildonics

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