Digital Ethics

Just tell me the reason isn’t what I think it is, @Uber pic.twitter.com/5Tn1sYZnSS— Adam Bomb (@_Adam_Bomb_) August 15, 2021

You may not realize it, but every website you visit is created, literally, the moment you arrive. Each element of the page — the pictures, the ads, the text, the comments — live on computers in different places and are sent to your device when you request them. That means that it’s easy for companies to create different web pages for different people. Sometimes that customization is helpful, such as when you see search results for restaurants near you. Sometimes it can be creepy, such as when ads follow you around from website to website. And sometimes customization can cost you money, research has shown. Orbitz showed higher-priced hotels to owners of Mac computers, for instance. Staples offered the same products at higher prices to people living in certain ZIP codes. See the whole series here: ProPublica.org/blackbox

Silicon Valley should get out of the business of regulating sexually explicit materials – its actions against NSFW material put marginalised groups at even more risk

We all know that, in the 21st century, it is difficult to lead a life without a cell phone. It is also difficult to change your number—the one all your friends, family, doctors, children’s schools, and so on—have for you. It’s especially difficult to do these things if you are trying to leave an abusive situation where your abuser is in control of your family plan and therefore has access to your phone records. Thankfully, the Safe Connections Act (S. 120) would change that. Tell Congress: survivors of domestic violence should have an easy way to separate their phones from their abusers’ control.

For 30-years, Ethi-call has fielded quandaries from parents, professionals and more – but the pandemic has ushered in a new raft of predicaments

Adopting AI responsibly isn't easy. Challenges stand in the way -- but they can be overcome with careful design considerations.

A Princeton study finds that popular AI datasets are prone to mismanagement, and that retractions rarely have the intended effect.

The AI research community has tried to scrub away its past. But the internet is forever

The update shows the importance of choice in accessibility

This piece was written by Azmina Dhrodia and originally published by Thomson Reuters Foundation. While we can’t quickly unwind the sexism that drives abuse, we can redesign our digital spaces and change the online environments that allow this misogyny to thrive, writes Azmina Dhrodia. (Ed

Female journalists and activists say they had their private photos shared on social media by governments seeking to intimidate and silence them.

Good news! You can finally stop people from sharing files with you by blocking them in Google Drive. I bet you're not even slightly surprised that this turned out to be something abusive ex-partners use to harass survivors. pic.twitter.com/OX5B7OWmoC— Eva (@evacide) August 8, 2021

Research By: Slava Makkaveev Introduction Since 2007, Amazon has sold tens of millions of Kindles, which is impressive. But this also means that tens of millions of people could have potentially been hacked through a software bug in those same Kindles. Their devices could be turned into bots or their private local networks could be... Click to Read More

To better understand the ethics of machine learning datasets, we picked three controversial face recognition / person recognition datasets—DukeMTMC, MS-Celeb-1M, and Labeled Faces in the Wild—and analyzed ~1,000 papers that cite them. Paper: https://t.co/FZRO4eB1TtThread ⬇️— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) August 9, 2021

These are fair question regarding systems like the one Apple has proposed, and there is enough general ignorance regarding some of the building blocks that I think it is worth attempting to answer.But it's going to take way more than a few tweets, so settle in... https://t.co/h8f0F0YmpK— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) August 8, 2021

A group of researchers says that artificial intelligence can be used to trick most biometric face scanners.

Atlas of AI pic.twitter.com/76gJEk4H9J— Evan Thompson (@evantthompson) August 4, 2021

A recent scientific paper proposed that, like Big Tobacco in the Seventies, Big Tech thrives on creating uncertainty around the impacts of its products and business model. One of the ways it does this is by cultivating pockets of friendly academics who can be relied on to echo Big Tech talking points, giving them added gravitas in the eyes of lawmakers. Google highlighted working with favourable academics as a key aim in its strategy, leaked in October 2020, for lobbying the EU’s Digital Markets Act – sweeping legislation that could seriously undermine tech giants’ market dominance if it goes through. Now, a New Statesman investigation can reveal that over the last five years, six leading academic institutes in the EU have taken tens of millions of pounds of funding from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft to research issues linked to the tech firms' business models, from privacy and data protection to AI ethics and competition in digital markets. While this funding tends to come with guarantees of academic independence, this creates an ethical quandary where the subject of research is also often the primary funder of it. var pymParent = new pym.Parent("bars", "https://nsmg-projects-public.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/live/nsmg-072/bars/index.html", {}); The New Statesman has also found evidence of an inconsistent approach to transparency, with some senior academics failing to disclose their industry funding. Other academics have warned that the growing dependence on funding from the industry raises questions about how tech firms influence the debate around the ethics of the markets they have created. The Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), for example, received a $7.5m grant from Facebook in 2019 to fund five years of research, while the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, has accepted almost €14m from Google since it was founded in 2012, and the tech giant accounts for a third of the institute's third-party funding. The Humboldt Institute is seeking to diversify its funding sources, but still receives millions from Google Annual funding to the Humboldt Institute by Google and other third-party institutions !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

The pandemic increased the demand and possibility of automating care, but doing so may deliver racist stereotypes and unemployment for women of color.

Exclusive: ‘On The Move’ website claims to offer ‘reliable information’ but does not disclose government affiliation

This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. pic.twitter.com/GJeWmFKIeH— Heather Burns (@WebDevLaw) January 27, 2018

Catherine Zhu of Foley & Lardner LLP examines the increasing use of dark patterns and movement at both state and federal levels to ban or regulate such practices.

Former and current Google employees said that H.R. would respond to their workplace complaints by referring them to counseling programs instead of addressing the broader issues.

The inside story of Sophie Zhang’s battle to combat rampant manipulation as executives delayed and deflected

A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew about specific examples of global political manipulation — and failed to act.

When combined The Facebook Companies know a huge amount about you

Interviews with 23 experts identify a pattern.