Category: Other Topics
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On the Ethics of A/B Testing
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice called A/B testing, in which a company provides two versions of its service to randomly-chosen groups of users, and then measures how the users react.…
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Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide
The research community is buzzing about the ethics of Facebook’s now-famous experiment in which it manipulated the emotional content of users’ news feeds to see how that would affect users’ activity on the site. (The paper, by Adam Kramer of Facebook, Jamie Guillory of UCSF, and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell, appeared in Proceedings of the…
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Free Law Project Partnering in Stewardship of RECAP
More than five years ago, I spoke at CITP about the US Federal Courts electronic access system called PACER. I noted that despite centuries of precedent stating that the public should have access to the law as openly and freely as possible, the courts were charging unreasonable rates for access to the public record. As…
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Reflecting on Sunshine Week
Last Wednesday evening, I attended the D.C. Open Government Summit: Street View, which took place at the National Press Club in conjunction with Sunshine Week. The Summit was sponsored by the D.C. Open Government Coalition, a non-profit that “seeks to enhance the public’s access to government information and ensure the transparency of government operations of…
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Algorithms can be more accountable than people
At an academic meeting recently, I was surprised to hear some social scientists accept as obviously correct the claim that involving “algorithms” in decision-making, instead of sticking with good old-fashioned human decision-making, necessarily reduces accountability and increases the risk of bias. I tend to believe the opposite, that making processes algorithmic improves our ability to…
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Information Facilitating Participation in Elections Must Be Readily Available – Principle #10 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies
For the final installment of my series of blog posts outlining ten principles that governments and local communities should consider when evaluating whether they are using digital technology effectively to facilitate civic engagement, I will discuss the issue that goes to the core of democracy in our country – the public having access to information…
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A Good Day at the Googleplex
Judge Chin has issued his decision in the Google Book Search case, and it’s a win for Google. For those of you who have been following the litigation, it’s been a long trip through the arcana of class certification. Today’s decision, however, finally gets to the merits of Google’s fair use defense under the…
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Wall Street software failure and a relationship to voting
An article in The Register explains what happened in the Aug 1 2012 Wall Street glitch that cost Knight Capital $440M, resulted in a $12M fine, nearly bankrupted Knight Capital (and forced them to merge with someone else). In short, there were 8 servers that handled trades; 7 of them were correctly upgraded with new…
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Ethical dilemmas faced by software engineers: A roundup of responses
Two weeks ago I asked for real-life examples of ethical dilemmas in software engineering. Many of you sent responses by email, twitter, and comments. Thank you for taking the time! Here is a quick summary (in no particular order). Aaron Massey has written a very thoughtful post in response. I encourage you to give it…