Digital Ethics

Tech companies have financial and social incentives to create discriminatory products.

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

The 21st century version of the Wild West wanted poster has become a social media staple for police departments across the country.

Think you can tell a dark pattern from an ethically designed prompt? Take our quiz to find out

When the hospital temperature sensor won’t let you into the building because it’s 38° and it thinks you have a fever 😑 pic.twitter.com/2jxD81hd9l— Tamara Hinz (@hinz_tamara) July 2, 2021

Google promised a fix after its photo-categorization software labeled black people as gorillas in 2015. More than two years later, it hasn't found one.

AI is revolutionizing everyone’s life, and it is crucial that it does so in the right way. AI’s profound and far-reaching potential for transformation concerns

do it. do the thing📱📱📱 pic.twitter.com/JmIVUdLTb8— Mar Hicks (@histoftech) July 2, 2021

The company won’t change its ways without adopting new measures of success.

People finally realizing the "con" in Silicon Valley startups: a thread. 1/— Mark Hurst (@markhurst) July 1, 2021

Twitter's META team is made up of some of tech's most notorious critics, and two more will soon be joining them: Sarah Roberts and Kristian Lum.

'A bio for Donna Strickland, the physicist who invented a technology used by all the high-powered lasers in the world, was created on Wikipedia. In less than 6 mins it was flagged for a “speedy deletion” & shortly thereafter erased from the site' @ftripodi https://t.co/OAGfmJqPJJ— Cindy Gallop (@cindygallop) June 28, 2021

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online  This handbook features theoretical, empirical, policy and legal analysis of technology facilitated violence and abuse

Contract drivers say algorithms terminate them by email—even when they have done nothing wrong.

Investigators in Germany are using Google Earth, YouTube clips and social media posts to bring political crimes to the courts

Tel Aviv, Israel, June 25, 2021 / PRNewswire / – Adversa AI, the leading startup for Trusted AI Research, has demonstrated a new way to attack AI facial recognition applications. … Read More

For better accountability, we should shift the focus from the design of these systems to their impact.

Challenging and redrawing framings of technology to serve human flourishing and justice

When you ask AI models a question, they are programmed to give you an answer—even if they know little to nothing about the subject. Model overconfidence is the reason why many AI deployments fail. But a solution exists—and if your model isn't using it, you might not want to trust its judgments.

The Premise app pays users, many in the developing world, to do tasks like taking photos and completing surveys for clients including the U.S. military.

1. We have a new paper out in PNAS today, in which we address the harm wrought by dramatically restructuring human communication of the span of a decade, with no aim other than selling ads. It might be the most important paper of my career.https://t.co/sBWZtr9ZyE— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) June 21, 2021

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems. There are no data underlying this work.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly improving, becoming an embedded feature of almost any type of software platform you can imagine, and serving as the foundation for countless types of digital assistants. It’s used in everything from data analytics and pattern recognition to automation and speech replication.  The potential of this technology has sparked imaginative minds for decade...

In scope, ambition, and animating philosophy, American privacy law and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation are almost diametric opposites. The GDPR’s am

The laws governing what data corporations can collect heavily influence the extent to which law enforcement can pry into our lives. Consumer privacy laws have f

Privacy can be difficult for people to conceptualize, including for the policymakers charged with designing, interpreting, and enforcing privacy law. In both co

Always-listening devices like smart speakers, smartphones, and other voice-activated technologies create enough privacy problems when working correctly. But the

The rise of remote proctoring software during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the dangers of surveillance-enabled pedagogy built on the belief that students c