Ethics in Technology

Collecting articles and talking about the role of ethics and the human factors in technology.

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This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup

The other night my good friend & fellow cryptoenthusiast Ryan Shea suggested we head to a new Bitcoin meetup neither of us had been to before. I agreed to meet him there, and though the conversation...

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The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers' wages

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by...

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Eagle Scout. Idealist. Drug Trafficker?

Friends call Ross Ulbricht sensitive and soulful. Prosecutors contend that he ran a global, illicit online bazaar.

...“I suspect that the online drug marketplace is a passing fad because it’s too traceable, too vulnerable to hacking,” said Mr. Weaver at the International Computer Science Institute. Once Bitcoins are converted to another currency, the government can subpoena the records of the exchange where the transaction took place and harvest all the information it needs. “Bitcoin isn’t really a ‘coin’ as much as a distributed, public balance ledger,” Mr. Weaver added, “with every balance and transaction recorded.”

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"Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day." That's what women are told...

 “Silicon Valley has the power to shape society to conform to its values, which prioritize openness and connectivity,” Jurgenson says. “But why are engineers in California getting to decide what constitutes harassment for people all around the world?”

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The World's Best Bounty Hunter Is 4-Foot-11. Here's How She Hunts | Threat Level | Wired.com

Michelle Gomez is a genius at finding people who want to stay lost. But she'd never gone after anyone like Ryan Eugene Mullen before.

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Finally, a Ruling That Recognizes Snowden as a Whistleblower | Threat Level | Wired.com

“In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty,” (.pdf) the group said in one of dozens of recommendations it made in the wake of Snowden’s leaks.

Greg Nojeim, a director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, said the report “adds to the growing momentum for meaningful reform of intelligence and surveillance practices.”

It’s clearer than ever that Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor.

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People, Not Data

This is San Francisco’s main Food Stamps office. People call it twelve-thirty-five, as in 1235 Mission Street. The first…

My fellowship year clarified more problems than solutions. Instead, I’ll offer a question: How can we build empathetic government services?

Well, first things first: User needs. An empathetic service would ground itself in the concrete needs of concrete people. It’s not about innovation, big data, government-as-a-platform, transparency, crowd-funding, open data, or civic tech. It’s about people. Learning to prioritize people and their needs will be a long slog. It’s the kind of change that happens slowly, one person at a time. But we should start.

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On Technical Entitlement

That’s technical entitlement. It starts with a strong background in tech, often at a very young age. With some extreme confidence and perhaps a bit of obliviousness, this blooms into technical entitlement, an attitude characterized by showmanship and competitiveness.

It’s easy to dismiss technical entitlement. People often cite social ineptitude as a reason for unpleasant behavior in tech. But, frankly, I’m tired of that excuse. The fact is, the behavior that comes from technical entitlement is poisonous. It can really ruin someone’s introduction to computer science.

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This kind of privilege that I – and other people who looked like me – possessed was silent, manifested not in what people said, but rather in what they didn't say. We had the privilege to spend enormous amounts of time developing technical expertise without anyone's interference or implicit discouragement. Sure, we worked really hard, but our efforts directly translated into skill improvements without much loss due to interpersonal friction. Because we looked the part.

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HandUp - Direct giving for the homeless and others at-risk

HandUp is direct giving for homeless people and others in need in your neighborhood. Your donations are redeemed for basic needs like food, clothing, and medical care through our partner organization Project Homeless Connect.

HandUp is a tech startup with a social mission. We’ve created a new way to donate directly to homeless people and people in need here in the US. Starting in San Francisco, we’ve partnered with Project Homeless Connect to help deliver new resources to the thousands of homeless and at risk people in our community.

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Techbrats Goldberg, Shih, and Gopman do not represent the tech industry

In 20 or 30 years, what will we look back on and say “That was the issue of our time?".. I believe employment and wage disparity are the critical issues of our time.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly and glaringly than in San Francisco. Rents in the city have skyrocketed and social unrest between the haves and have-nots has reached a boiling point. (Most recently, we saw protesters throwing a rock through the window of one of Google’s luxurious private buses.)

It’s hard for people not to hate technologists when faced with the absolute loathsomeness of three now-infamous industry executives: Peter Shih, Greg Gopman, and Bryan Goldberg...

These noisy individuals do not represent the technology industry within which I’ve built my career. No, the technologists of true success and merit develop and execute strategies to make society more just, fair and joyful for all.

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If A Tech Company Had Built The Federal Health Care Website

The rollout of the health care exchange has been plagued by a host of technical problems.

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Fixing the Digital Economy

A decentralization of power coincides with an intense concentration of power. This apparent contradiction makes perfect sense once one understands the nature of modern power.

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Report: Government data collection imperils liberty and security | Al Jazeera America

“If we change nothing, I think we risk having quite significant databases of Americans that haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. “That might have a chilling effect on protests and people speaking out. Even moderate voices might say, 'It’s not worth it for me to speak out, because it might end up on a database.'"

but also:

The Brennan Center’s report and experts like Schneier suggest that completely ending surveillance programs isn’t the way to curb their inefficiencies and potential for ethically questionable uses.

Experts say that with better laws and oversight, surveillance programs can keep Americans secure without sacrificing civil liberties.

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Your Digital Trail: Private Company Access

While not always obvious, websites commonly allow other companies to track user behavior.

..."I think companies haven't figured out how to talk to people about data or privacy," says Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum. "And we think that's a big part of why the industry has such a bad rap. They're worried that [consumers'] reaction will be, 'That's creepy. I don't like it.' "

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Personal Genomics Firm 23andMe Patents Designer Baby System, Denies Plans to Use It - Wired Science

“It would be so irresponsible of 23andMe to actually offer a product or service based on this patent,” said Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a bioethics think tank concerned with the responsible use of genetic and reproductive technology.

Not everyone would agree: though polls suggest that most Americans oppose screening for non-medical traits, some people argue that “designing” babies by selecting traits like intelligence is no more sinister than sending them to good schools or doctors, and that selecting traits like eye color isn’t especially harmful .

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To Darnovsky, designer babies are in a sense less troubling than our ideas about them. Overestimating the importance of genes could lead people to underestimate the importance of everything else...

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The Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

The real problem with ebooks is that they’re more 'e' than book, so an entirely different set of rules govern what someone can and can't do with them compared to physical books, especially when it comes to pricing. The collusion in pricing has been a public issue for a while, but we need to talk more about how they are priced differently to consumers and to libraries. That’s how ebooks contribute to the ever-growing divide between the haves and have-nots.