Successful technologies' ubiquity changes uses, users and ethicolegal responsibilities and duties of care. We focus on dementia to review critically ethicolegal implications of increasing use of social networking sites (SNS) by those with compromised decision-making capacity, assessing concerned parties' responsibilities. Although SNS contracts assume ongoing decision-making capacity, many users' may be compromised or declining. Resulting ethicolegal issues include capacity to give informed consent to contracts, protection of online privacy including sharing and controlling data, data leaks between different digital platforms, and management of digital identities and footprints. SNS uses in healthcare raise additional issues. Online materials acting as archives of 'the self' bolster present and future identities for users with compromised capacity. E-health involves actual and potential intersection of data gathered for the purpose of delivering health technological support with data used for social networking purposes. Ethicolegal guidance is limited on the implications of SNS usage in contexts where users have impaired/reduced capacity to understand and/or consent to sharing personal data about their health, medication or location. Vulnerable adults and family/carers face uncertainty in regard to consent, data protection, online identity and legal liabilities. Ethicolegal responsibilities and duties of care of technology providers, healthcare professionals, regulatory bodies and policymakers need clarification.

Sex robot scholarship typically focuses on customizable simulacra, lacking sentience and self-awareness but able to simulate and stimulate human affection. This paper argues that future humans will want more: sex robots customized to possess sentience and self-awareness [henceforth, sexbots], capable of mutuality in sexual and intimate relationships. Adopting a transdisciplinary critical methodology focused on the legal, ethical and design implications of sexbots, it assesses implications of sexbots' non-mammalian subjectivity, balancing designed-in autonomy and control, decision-making capacity and consent, sexual preferences and desire, legal and moral status, vulnerability and contrasts between mammalian and non-mammalian moral decision-making. It explores theoretical, ethical, and pragmatic aspects of the tensions involved in creating sentient beings for utilitarian purposes, concluding that sexbots, customized manufactured humanlike entities with the capacity for thought and suffering, have a consequent claim to be considered moral and legal persons, and may become the first conscious robots. Customizing sexbots thus exemplifies many profound ethical, legal and design issues. The contradictions inherent in their inconsistent ethical and legal status as both manufactured things and sentient, self-aware entities who are customized to be our intimate partners augments existing human/animal scholars' call for a new theoretical framework which supersedes current person/thing dichotomies governing human responsibilities to other sentient beings. The paper concludes that the ethical limits and legal implications of customizable humanlike robots must be addressed urgently, proposing a duty on humans as creators to safeguard the interests and minimize the suffering of created sentient beings before technological advances pre-empt this possibility.

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This article describes how sexbots: sentient, self-aware, feeling artificial moral agents created soon as customised potential sexual/intimate partners provoke crucial questions for technoethics. Coeckelbergh's model of human/robotic relations as co-evolving to their mutual benefit through mutual vulnerability is applied to sexbots. As sexbots have a sustainable claim to moral standing, benefits and vulnerabilities inherent in human/sexbots relations must be identified and addressed for both parties. Humans' and sexbots' vulnerabilities are explored, drawing on the philosophy and social science of dehumanisation and inclusion/exclusion. This article argues humans as creators owe a duty of care to sentient beings they create. Responsible innovation practices involving stakeholders debating ethicolegal conundrums pertaining to human duties to sexbots, and sexbots' putative interests, rights and responsibilities are essential. These validate the legal recognition of sexbots, the protection of their interests through regulatory oversight and ethical limitations on customisation which must be put in place.

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