Fuck it, serve the files directly.

author: Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca> 2015-07-03 22:31:49 -0400
committer: Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca> 2015-07-03 22:35:09 -0400
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+		Undirected Musings about Ethics
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+	<div id="article">
+		<h1 id="undirected-musings-about-ethics">Undirected Musings about Ethics</h1>
+<h2 id="further-reading">Further reading</h2>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-fantasy-and-abuse-of-the-manipulable-user">The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User</a></li>
+<li><a href="https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2005/11/ethics-for-programmers-primum-non.html">Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm">The Internet with a Human Face</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals">Ethics vs Morals</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com">Yes means Yes</a></li>
+</ul>
+<h2 id="why-bother">Why bother?</h2>
+<p>Everyone <em>thinks</em> they're doing good most of the time. Ethical codes help
+guide that sense into alignment with the surrounding social and political
+context: doing good for whom, why, and with what kinds of caveats.</p>
+<h2 id="its-not-about-engineering-its-about-people">It's not about engineering, it's about people</h2>
+<p>An ethical code for software development should not waste too much space
+talking about <em>engineering practices</em>. Certainly there is value in getting
+more developers and systems people to follow good engineering practice, but
+an ethical code should focus on the interaction between trustworthiness, the
+greater good, the personal good of <em>all</em> the participants in the system, and
+software itself.</p>
+<p>(This comes up in Ethics for Programmers, above.)</p>
+<p>It's no good to build a wonderfully-engineered system that is cheap to run
+and easy to integrate with if it systematically disenfranchises and abuses
+its users for the benefit of its owners, and that's a problem we actually
+have via Facebook, Github, Twitter, and numerous others.</p>
+<h2 id="ethical-codes-are-fundamentally-extrinsic">Ethical codes are fundamentally extrinsic</h2>
+<p>Ethical codes exist so that others can judge our behaviour, not so that we
+can judge our own behaviour.</p>
+<h2 id="ethical-codes-must-be-constraining">Ethical codes must be constraining</h2>
+<p>Ethical codes do not exist in a vacuum. A code that authorizes its adherents
+to behave in any way they see fit, subject only to their own judgement, is no
+ethical code at all. We already have that and the results have not been great.</p>
+<p><em>This is important</em> - a meaningful ethical code for software would probably
+cripple most software business models. An ethical code that prioritizes
+active consent, for example, completely cripples advertising and analytics,
+and puts a big roadblock in buyouts like Instagram's. This may well be good
+for society.</p>
+<h2 id="integrity-is-not-about-contracts-or-legislation">Integrity is not about contracts or legislation</h2>
+<p>Ethics, personal integrity, and group integrity are tangled together, but
+modern Western conceptions of group integrity tend to revolve around “does
+this group break the law or engender lawsuits,” not “does this group act in
+the best interests of people outside of it.”</p>
+<h2 id="assumptions">Assumptions</h2>
+<p>I've embedded some of my personal morality into the “ethics” articles in this
+section, in the absence of a published moral code. Those, obviously, aren't
+absolute, but you can reason about their validity if you assume that I
+believe the “end user's” privacy and active consent take priority over the
+technical cleverness or business value of a software system.</p>
+<h3 id="consent-and-social-software">Consent and social software</h3>
+<p>This has some complicated downstream effects: “active consent” means
+something you can't handwave away by putting implied consent (for example, to
+future changes) in an EULA or privacy statement. I haven't written much that
+calls out this pattern because it's <em>pervasive</em>.</p>
+<p>The “end user is the real product” business model most social networks
+operate on is fundamentally unethical under this code. It will always be more
+valuable to the “real customers” (advertisers, analytics platforms, law
+enforcement, and intelligence agencies) for users to be opted into new
+measurements by default, <em>assuming</em> consent rather than obtaining it.</p>
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author	Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca>	2015-07-03 22:31:49 -0400
committer	Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca>	2015-07-03 22:35:09 -0400
commit	76aed6ef732de38d82245b3d674f70bab30221e5 (patch)
tree	d50e9a296d91ef8a49bcb29c3e80096f200a3c26 /.html/ethics/musings.html
parent	92f66d3e3a0996bb1fad9dc83d7e184f92673e5d (diff)