Digital Ethics

Stanford just launched their Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (@StanfordHAI) with great fanfare. The mission: "The creators and designers of AI must be broadly representative of humanity."121 faculty members listed.Not a single faculty member is Black. pic.twitter.com/znCU6zAxui— Chad Loder ➐ (@chadloder) March 21, 2019

Timnit Gebru looks around the AI world and sees almost no one who looks like her. That’s a problem for all of us.

There was a time when technology was perceived as neutral. But we now know the technology we thought would save us is actually recreating the same kinds of inequalities we were trying to redress in the first place. Princeton sociologist Ruha Benjamin asks if there's a way to create a new technological reality without a digital underclass.

The US criminal legal system uses predictive algorithms to try to make the judicial process less biased. But there’s a deeper problem.

Following the publication of a landmark MIT study alleging gender and racial bias in their Rekognition AI product, Amazon have gone on the defensive.

Ethical questions about artificial intelligence are being raised by “obvious problems” with biased algorithms

Facebook is ill-equipped to define what constitutes voter suppression, especially at the local level.

The Facebook CEO's Georgetown speech tried to assauge the complaints of Democrats, Republicans and the news media against his company. But will it work?

Facebook’s CEO rallies people around the First Amendment

Zuckerberg’s speech feels like empty words in the absence of any concrete changes to the company’s questionable policies on speech.

“There’s something fundamental at stake, which is: What does human agency look like?”

Zuckerberg said the company welcomes regulation, but that's not the message on Capitol Hill.

When Elizabeth Warren criticised Facebook over their decision to let Trump run false ads, Facebook compared itself to a broadcaster. That was a big mistake

Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Records reviewed by The Washington Post show that at least 44 public and private universities in the United States work with outside consulting companies to collect and analyze data on prospective students, either by tracking their Web activity or formulating predictive scores to measure each student’s likelihood of enrolling. The vast majority of universities reviewed by The Post do not tell students the schools are collecting their information.

I was beginning to think Foucault’s writings on the “disciplinary society” were becoming irrelevant. But then my niece started the 5th grade. Her teachers add and subtract behavioral points in an app shared with her mom. Note that she lost a point for using the restroom today. pic.twitter.com/3nXJ9Mdbyo— Josh Seim (@JoshSeim) September 27, 2019

On Tuesday, a Google representative told Business Insider the company had made an "error."

Given recent events, it looks like it’s time in the grand evolutionary arc of technology to establish this as a pattern.

Discover the world’s best science and medicine | Nature.com

Google allegedly scanned volunteers with dark skin tones in order to perfect the Pixel phone’s face-unlock technology.

Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me.

Facebook's ability to figure out the "people we might know" is sometimes eerie. Many a Facebook user has been creeped out when a one-time Tinder date or an ex-boss from 10 years ago suddenly pops up as a friend recommendation. How does the big blue giant know?

The bill has raised questions about speech protections

Twitter has said it used phone numbers and email addresses, provided by users to set up two-factor authentication on their accounts, to serve targeted ads. In a disclosure Tuesday, the social media giant said it did not know how many users were impacted. The issue stemmed from the company’s tailored audiences program, which allows companies […]

In 2014, Christopher Wylie resigned from his position as Cambridge Analytica's research director. He later exposed the company's role in the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum.

But there’s an ethical catch to it, a new study finds.

If Big Tech becomes synonymous with the internet, we could lose free choice, democracy, and even the ability to imagine a different world

Shannon Vallor is worried about killer robots. But not for the reasons you might think.