During a recent talk to computer science students and faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla., I closed with thoughts about ethics for people who create software. The inclusion of "backdoors" into a Web browser, the capability to track people who use cellphones, and the use of facial-recognition programs raise ethical issues. How much intrusion should consumers put up with, and what are the ethical responsibilities of the people who create these applications?
During the question-and-answer session, several people asked me how much intrusion I will put up with. I answered, "Not much." I refuse to show a photo ID when I make an in-person credit card purchase, I have no Facebook page, I rarely use "affinity" cards in stores, and my driver's license uses an ID number instead of my Social Security number. My family and I take other privacy measures, too.
In some situations, though, we cannot try to protect our privacy until we know someone has violated it. Suppose you slip and fall on spilled liquid in a grocery store and must sue the store chain to recover damages. Because you use an affinity card to get discounts, the store knows how much beer and wine you purchase, and threatens to reveal the quantities and dates at trial. Perhaps then the jury will think you had too much to drink and lost your balance. You thought your records of purchases remained private, and the store never told you otherwise.
I have heard stories about insurance companies investigating food purchases to determine the type of diet an applicant follows and whether that diet includes a lot of fatty or high-calorie food. So you might get denied life insurance because your grocery purchases reveal an "unhealthy" lifestyle. The software doesn't know you buy two dozen donuts each Saturday for your kid's soccer team.
The process of gathering information about you and then using it for a purpose unknown to you raises ethical issues for the people who create such systems. Thus, programmers and software designers must revisit the ethics of their profession and consider them carefully.
As a consultant I've chosen not to work on projects because I thought they violated my own, personal ethics. However that is very hard to do with a day job. You can talk to senior management and lobby for your cause, but if you have a career tied up in a company it's very difficult to severe ties because they want to splash advertising on the dashboard every time you start your car. The justification is that It's annoying, rather than illegal, and only violates your own personal standards, not the standards of society which seem to be incredibly tolerant. Heck, look how popular Facebook is.
Talk about a balancing act. You raise many legitimate issues in terms of a software developer's responsibility to the end result of what his or her code ends up doing. But the reality is that in today's world, everything you do triggers some sort of data collection activity that is then put to use for something--whether to convince you buy something else or to give a manufacturer better intelligence on how their product is used.
That seems to be where the world is heading thanks to technology advances like infinite cloud processing power, social media, and big-data analytics. So how does a lone software engineer buck the tide of global innovation (that's what some would call it). Isn't that a mere recipe for losing a job?
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