2/17/2017 2 Comments February 17th, 2017Blog 4
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/10/23/240239062/five-things-to-know-about-the-nsas-surveillance-activities This article goes over the overarching topics that surround the National Security Agency’s (NSA) current surveillance activities. The NSA has the ability to access and monitor many different mediums of communication such as telephone calls, emails, and instant messages. The general idea is that the NSA collects data on the unsuspecting citizens in order to potentially find and identify those who pose a threat to national security. Essentially they are trying to prevent attacks to the government and citizens of the U.S.A. Some people question the ethics of having this program in place. The NSA states that they are doing this to protect the general population, but it comes at the cost of personal privacy. The NSA also intercepts the communications of those outside of the country and these activities are not regulated at all as a result of no U.S. citizens being involved in the monitoring. The ethical dilemma essentially comes down to if the invasion of privacy by a secretive agency is acceptable to ensure the security of the same people being monitored. I think that the monitoring itself is not unethical, at this point in time it is very unreasonable to expect complete anonymity using any modern communication devices. We essentially trade away our anonymity and our privacy for the convenience of the immediacy of the current technology. If one truly wanted to stay anonymous or private there are options available to do so, it is only that most would not chose those options. I think the main issue with the NSA monitoring our communications is that there is no way to currently ensure that agency is following ethical practices with the information they have deemed important enough to track and record. If there is some way to enforce accountability and ethical practices then I feel more people would come to accept that some loss of privacy is necessary to ensure our collective security.
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2/10/2017 2 Comments February 10th, 2017Blog 3
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/14/technology/how-self-driving-cars-work.html?_r=1 This article gives some information on the technologies that are being developed for the autonomous and assisted driving vehicles of the future. One of potential dangers that is brought up in the article is about an accident that occurred between a vehicle with assisted driving and a large trailer truck. In this incident the vehicle failed to identify the danger of the situation and assist the driver in avoiding the crash. This inevitably brings up the question of who is at fault for the accident, the driver or the car manufacturer. Ultimately the manufacturer will not be legally blamed for the incident because at the end of the day the assistive software is not currently meant to remove all decisions and responsibility from the driver. But, the manufacturer stated after the accident occurred that if the vehicle in the accident had been updated to the most current software version then it would have been more likely to detect and avoid the crash. It could be argued that the assistive technology is being developed while using the consumers as disposable test subjects, is this method of development ethical? I would like to think that the developers of this technology are not proceeding with a blind eye to the perils they introduce to the general public. The developers could justify the dangers of using the technology by stating that there are warnings and the customers have knowingly decided to use the technology at their own risk. I think that any new technology comes with a risk and it is part of the process of moving society forward. If there was no risk taken then our society would stagnate and fall apart. As the manufacturer stated, the issue was addressed and it would appear if any further issues happened they would be fixed as well. As long as there is a good faith effort to prevent the injury of those involved then I believe the act to be justifiably ethical. 2/3/2017 0 Comments February 03rd, 2017Blog 2
http://digiday.com/brands/2016yearinpreview-targeting-ads-get-lot-creepier/ This article outlines the state of advertising on the internet. Essentially targeted ads work by a marketing company assigning a tracker in the browser the consumer is using and recording the products that consumer is viewing or searching for. Once that marketing company has information related to that tracker, they then send advertisements to the browser of the consumer when that browser loads a page which displays ads from that marketing company. This might not immediately seem like an ethical issue and it really isn’t at the surface level. When used ethically it is simply an efficient use of time and resources by the marketing company, instead of wasting time, money, and screen real estate the marketing company can serve their advertisements to those who would most likely be interested in their products. The real ethical issues come into play when this type of marketing is used to target vulnerable demographics such as young children, the elderly, or those with diminished mental faculty. There is currently nothing to stop an unethical marketing company from using their targeting techniques to identify and aggressively target people who would otherwise not be interested in their products. Another ethical dilemma with targeted advertising is: how much privacy loss is considered too much by these marketing companies. The collection of browsing data seems harmless enough, but when a faceless company is tracking activity without any warning it can be unnerving to be served an advertisement for the same or similar product ten minutes later on a completely different website. The last attempt at governmental regulation occurred roughly five years ago which means that currently the online marketing world is self regulated. This leaves the average internet user at the mercy of the ethical bearings of each of the hundreds of marketing companies on the internet. I think that targeted marketing, like many new technologies, is not inherently good or bad, but can be used in ethical and unethical ways. Because there is currently no regulation specifically for online targeted marketing it is still a vulnerable technology. 1/27/2017 1 Comment January 27th, 2017Blog 1
medium.freecodecamp.com/the-code-im-still-ashamed-of-e4c021dff55e# I believe that the author of this article has done no wrong, at least from an ethics point of view. The author seems to think that they are the one to blame, that the death of a person who took a powerful drug was somehow his fault. I do not think that this belief is based upon sound reasoning and the author has not taken any unethical actions. Both the programmer and the company are not at fault. The author seems to think that they were the one to tell the girl to take the medicine. A pharmaceutical company is not liable for someone taking a drug, even if it is marketed by that company, without consulting their doctor. For a medicine with such powerful side effects, one being increased suicidal thoughts, a prescription must be obtained from a doctor. There is not a reason for the quiz to be the point to target in this situation, if there is even a person to blame it would the the girl’s attending physician. There are innumerable variables which could have caused this situation to occur, the girl could have been suicidal before taking the drug, she could have been in an abusive situation and saw no way out, she could of had or developed a mental disorder even without taking the drug. In short, her death could have been completely unrelated to the drug but they are linked by whichever media outlet produced the story simply because one of the side effects of the drug in question is increased suicidal thoughts. The author cannot be blamed for creating an advertisement for a pharmaceutical company while working at a marketing solutions company. If the author applied their reasoning to other situations involving marketing then they would essentially be saying that people do not have free will after being subjected to marketing campaigns. The author appears to think marketing is tricking people into making decisions they did not want to make, if this is this case then there should be no marketing as any person will not be able to resist making choices they did not want to make. While the author may not have been at fault in this particular situation, the point raised by the author is a valid one. Due to the inevitable human interaction of the majority of software, a software programmer should be careful about what they develop. This caution should be employed by any person of course; but, as the author stated “we are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices.” There are many ethical dilemmas produced by any new technology and software has its own unique problem set that must be navigated in the days to come. The only way to ensure the best for humanity is to apply ethical reasoning to the actions we take each day. |
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May 2017
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