Digital Ethics

Design for the lives your users are living — not for the value you want to extract from them

1/ A couple of months ago, I discovered my health insurer was monitoring my sleep and using it to deny me benefits. So I told my colleague @marshall_allen…https://t.co/BYU1956k1a— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) November 21, 2018

It can be easy to simply accept algorithms as indisputable mathematic truths. After all, who wants to spend their spare time deconstructing complex equations? But make no mistake: algorithms are limited tools for understanding the world, frequently as flawed and biased as the humans who create and interpret them. In this brief animation, which was adapted from a 2017 presentation at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London, the US data scientist Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), argues that algorithms can be useful tools when thoughtfully deployed. However, their ...

Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

We live in a time of both extreme politics and extreme economics. The political side is familiar, but the economic side may be less so. It is represented by new concentrations of personal wealth and…

An open letter to @Facebook, @Twitter, @Instagram and @Experian regarding algorithms and my son's birth: pic.twitter.com/o8SuLMuLNv— Gillian Brockell (@gbrockell) December 11, 2018

We evolved to want variable rewards. What happens when smartphones give them to us?

Google knows nearly everything about you, from how you commute to your relationship status. There have never been more opportunities for marketers to exploit that data.

Just wow. The biggest murmuration of starlings I have ever seen. What a treat. pic.twitter.com/kFnaIDJ61v— Ricky Martin (@RexMartin) December 28, 2018

1998 "Don't get in a car with strangers" 2008: "Don't meet people from the internet alone." 2018: UBER Order yourself a stranger from the internet to get into a car with alone HEY from Imgur tagged as Being alone Meme

To truly achieve inclusiveness, we need to first look at who we’re excluding.

We can exploit the platform’s failings to reclaim our humanity

We asked teachers, professors, a psychiatrist and a technologist for their thoughts, and we heard a range of opinions on one of the most "weirdly divisive" issues in education.

I don’t want to brag, but I’m really good at sleeping. I close my eyes and fall asleep in about 45 seconds. I wake up eight hours later, no interruptions. Once, I read a Reddit thread about how sl

With toys for children that declare their love and want to chat, we bring to life a longstanding fantasy that machines might be our companions, that they might seem to not only be smart, but also to care about us.

Let me begin with a prescriptive statement: major social media companies ought to consult with trained social researchers to design interfaces, implement policies, and understand the implications o…

As a designer I’ve spent the last decade translating human needs and desires into experiences that fulfill them, and I’m convinced : the…

The case against empathy.

Company acknowledges ‘passive’ consumption of material can make people ‘feel worse’ but argues more engagement could improve wellbeing

The last year has demonstrated a sea change in design, as designers have created products that serve our deepest needs, rather than exploit them.

It's a way of quantifying a friendship, and it has a dark side.

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, gave me a candid insider's look at how social networks purposely hook and potentially hurt our brains.

In experience design, friction is usually the opposite of being intuitive or effortless. However, that doesn't mean that it's always bad for the users. In this article, you'll learn when and how friction can be an efficient tool to actually design better experiences.

Data science seems to be computer people trying to do social sciences without learning the foundations of our scientific approaches.— Laura Linda Laugwitz (@lauralindal) November 6, 2017

Today’s guest is a repeat visitor to the show whose last episode proved to be one of our most popular. Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke Un

Once in a while we feel the need to write about an uncomfortable feeling that's been niggling us. This post is one. It expresses a discomfort we have about so-called

Over the past few decades, the boundaries between the public (government), private (business), and social (non-profit) sectors have been blurring as many pionee

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality that concerns people's inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs. It is concerned with the motivation behind choices people make without external influence and interference. SDT focuses on the degree to which an individual's behavior is self-motivated and self-determined.[1][2][3]

You can build it, but should you?

A while back I wrote something which made a number of people angry: Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so. The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological. Rational people

“What can we help you with today?”

Researchers watch publishers watching you, ignore privacy settings, run over mere HTTP

"The Influential Mind" introduces less-than-intuitive tactics for changing beliefs and behaviors.

A data collection service called SafeGraph collected 17 trillion location markers for 10 million smartphones during the holiday last year.

The French are putting legal limits on being “on.”

It's Your World. Sexual Violence Doesn't Belong in It.

What is the role of a designer?

Aims to be the biggest checklist of inclusive design considerations ever - Heydon/inclusive-design-checklist

What you think you believe and what your unconscious associations reveal about your beliefs are often very different.

Challenge implicit biases by identifying your own, teaching colleagues about them, observing gap-closing teachers, stopping "tone policing," and tuning into such biases at your school.

Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Francesca Gino, an associate professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the…

The O’Reilly Radar Podcast: AI on the hype curve, imagining nurturing technology, and gaps in the AI conversation.

Dan Turner explores the gray areas of user expectations, honest interfaces, and making design decisions with integrity.