Digital Ethics

The past year has brought remarkable changes in the way we live our everyday lives. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most governments have placed restrictions in order to curb the spread of the virus, forcing billions of people to spend more time online, and less time outside. The pandemic has accelerated many trends in […]

A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor from housing, jobs, and basic services.

Alphabet Inc's Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists' papers by launching a "sensitive topics" review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and...

As the world grows increasingly complex, the limitations of user-centered design are beginning to emerge

“According to a detailed database of car crashes that Volvo has been keeping since the 1970s, who gets hurt in car crashes is changing [more pedestrians, people on bikes & kids in strollers] —and it’s forcing the company to rethink what car safety means.” https://t.co/S87XoB7OoP— Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian) December 21, 2020

The unintended consequences of user-centered design

The worship of data tries to eliminate friction: an ideology of the lesser resistance. However, friction is the key to dismantle this new wave of postivism.

How can we build machines that act rational, if the human, computing the machine, is boundedly rational?#Foucault pic.twitter.com/iXq9y8MVBm— Ajla Nesimovic🧑🏼‍🎄 (@EilerNemo) November 4, 2020

Harvard experts examine the promise and potential pitfalls as AI takes a bigger decision-making role in more industries.

platformabuse.org is a knowledge source of technological harms and mitigations to guide safer product development.

If you've upgraded your iPhone to iOS 14 already, you may have noticed a little green dot at the top of your screen when using certain apps. It's a new

Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers were fired in the wake of employee organizing efforts. Now, the NLRB says the terminations violated labor law.

Transformative and procedural justice are the foundation of Christine Su's vision for a safer site.

If the only answer to abusive people is successfully persuading them not to be abusive...Then the abuse becomes everyone else’s fault, for not catering to the abuser sufficiently enough to persuade him.Which is exactly the way an abusive person wants you to think.So, don’t.— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) December 5, 2020

The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society. The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.1/ pic.twitter.com/9saW0H95OI— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) November 25, 2020

The issue of machine learning systems perpetuating bias, not reducing it, remains as alive as ever.

E-waste is a global concern, and is quickly becoming a crisis of its own, the researchers state. In fact, more than 53 million metric tons of e-waste was produced in 2019.

Deepfake technology can make it seem like people are saying and doing things they aren't. Can it be used for good? Deep Reckonings, a series created by artist Stephanie Lepp, imagines controversial public figures having reckonings using synthetic videos.

Bias, discrimination, privacy violations, lack of accountability — AI entails a lot of ethical problems. Hyping AI creates additional…

The system works only if a lot of people buy into it, but people will buy into it only if they know it works.

Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.

As the recent election campaign in Tanzania reached a climax, opposition supporters began to notice something strange.

Foxglove is supporting social media content moderators in their fights for fair treatment from the platforms they work for, and for safe working conditions during the pandemic. Here is the full text of an open letter which over 200 Facebook content moderators from across the world have just addres

Frank Pasquale, an expert in the emergent field of A.I. law, argues it’s high time to update Asimov’s three laws of robotics

Auto-grading systems adopted in many districts were supposed to save time by using bots to score tests. But parents and teachers say the software leads to grading errors and requires them to double-check the bots’ work.

I kid you not! They don't even pretend not to do phrenology anymore (ht @vinayprabhu) pic.twitter.com/zSmZZKDt5M— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) November 8, 2020

When you get in your car in the morning, you might expect it to be the car that you left the night before.Not any more. James May, the television presenter, and Grant Shapps, the transport secretary

The rise of cloud computing and AI have popularised face recognition technology globally, but at what cost?