Serendipity35

Reading the latest newsletter from Amber Mac a topic that caught my education eye is ethical tech. Hope educational use of tech is always stressing ethical use, but is this also a topic that is being taught? 

At the end of 2018, The New York Times posted an article titled, "Yes, You Can Be an Ethical Tech Consumer. Here’s How" by Brian Chen, which notes that products that we enjoy continue to create privacy, misinformation and workplace issues. That article makes some recommendations, ranging from Boycott and Shame (not so radical if you consider the 2018 #DeleteFacebook campaign that I don't think was all that successful) to paths that mean we Give Up Convenience for Independence - something that is as easy as fulfilling that resolution to diet and exercise.

Of course, I am on the side of educating the public and our students at all grade levels about the ethical use and applications of technology. Students are largely consumers of the tech, but they will be the creators. Did Mark Zuckerberg ever have an courses or lesson on the ethical use of technology?

I know that at NJIT where I taught, there were a number of courses that touch on ethical issues. In the management area, "Legal and Ethical Issues: Explores the legal and ethical responsibilities of managers. Analyzes extent to which shareholders should be allowed to exercise their legitimate economic, legal, and ethical claims on corporate managers; extent of regulation of a particular industry, individual rights of the employee and various corporate interests, and corporate responsibility to consumers, society, and conservation of natural resources and the environment." Of course, you have to get to the graduate level for that course.

In my own humanities area of Professional and Technical Communication, we started in the foundation courses in addressing ethics in communications - but it is only one topic in a busy curriculum along with usability analysis, visual information; global diversity and communication concerns and communicating with new technologies.

In computer science, "Computers, Society and Ethics" is a 300 level course that examines the historical evolution of computer and information systems and explores their implications in the home, business, government, medicine and education. The course includes discussions of automation and job impact, privacy, and legal and ethical issues. Obviously, ethical use needs to be a part of many courses at a science and technology school, as well as being the subject matter of entire courses.

Amber says in her newsletter, that looking ahead "We will also continue to see social responsibility expand beyond the consumer. For example, let's think about investment dollars into new technologies. In the US alone, according to PitchBook, venture capital investment in US companies hit $100B in 2018. If we dig into these dollars, there are very few memorable headlines about ethical investments, but that is bound to change - especially as executives at large tech companies set new standards.

Engineers, designers, technical communicators and managers need to be better prepared for the world they are entering professionally. I proposed a course at NJIT on Social Media Ethics and Law that has yet to be approved or offered.

Amber continues that in terms of momentum on this ethical use  in companies, she points to software giant Salesforce as a leader. CNBC reported, the company will have its first Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer in 2019. And she points to a company that prides itself on being ethical and sustainable, Patagonia, as being "the north star of ethical business practices" and suggests that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg should take a long look at Patagonia's many years of dedicated corporate responsibility. Patagonia announced they will donate the $10M the company saved via GOP tax cuts to environmental groups. Amber points out that Patagonia has a long history of providing consumers with access to their supply chain footprint and she asks if that might be the kind of thing that Gen Z may demand from the companies from whom they purchase. They might - if they are properly educated on the ethical use of technology.

If you had a meeting and Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a speech and he was followed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and after the lunch break Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai were on the screen giving video messages, you would consider this to be a pretty high-powered meeting.

That was the lineup for some European data regulators at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, held this year in the European Parliament in Brussels.

I saw part of it on a recent 60 Minutes. Tim Cook talked about the "crisis" of "weaponized" personal data. It's not that Apple doesn't collect data on its users, but companies like Facebook and Google rely much more on user data to sell advertising than hardware-based Apple.

The focus in that segment is on Europe where where stricter laws than in the U.S. are already in place. Of course, they affect American companies that operate in Europe, which is essentially all major companies.

Multi-billion dollar fines against Google for anti-competitive behavior re in the news. The European Union enacted the world's most ambitious internet privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Tim Cook said he supports the law, but Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, says that "Americans have no control today about the information that's collected about them every second of their lives." The only exception is some guaranteed privacy on the internet for children under 13, and some specific medical and financial information.

This is an issue that will be even more critical in the next few years. Since GDPR was passed, at least ten other countries and the state of California have adopted similar rules. And Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon now say they could support a U.S. privacy law. Of course, they want input because they want to protect themselves.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Data Privacy Law: A Practical Guide

Facebook has had a tough year in the press and with its public face (though its stock is holding up fine). There has been a lot of buzz about hacks and data being stolen and fake news and Senate hearings and general privacy concerns. All of these are legitimate concerns about Facebook and about other social media and e-commerce and financial site too.

But how much does Facebook really know about a user? There is the information you willingly provided when you joined and all the things you have given them by posting and clicking Likes and other interactions. Though that volunteered data is often overlooked by users, there is more concern about data you have not knowingly given them but have access to anyway.

I do believe that Facebook is more focused now on privacy and user experience, it needs that data to be a profitable public company. (Disclaimer: I am a Facebook stockholder - though not in a very big way.)

Facebook is free but, as Mark Zuckerberg had to explain to at least one clueless Senator this past summer, it sells advertising to make a profit. Ad sales are more valuable to companies when they know who they are advertising to, and the more granular that audience can be, the better it is for them and Facebook. It might even be better for you. That is something Google, Amazon, Facebook and many others have been saying for years: If you're going to get ads anyway, wouldn't you rather that they be relevant to your likes and interests?

According to one online post, it you total up what Facebook can know about a user, it comes to roughly 52,000 traits. That comes from three key algorithms. One is DeepText, which looks into data, much of which coming from commercial data brokers. They also use DeepFace, which can identify people in pictures and also suggest that you tag people in a photo.

The third algorithm is FB Learner Flow, which might be the most clever of all. It focuses on the decisions you have yet to make. Using predictive analytics, it decides which ads should be shown to you that you would be likely to click and even purchase a product.

Amazon will allow you to let it send out products before you order them based on your previous orders and usage. This is not difficult to predict. My pharmacy will tell me it is time to reorder a prescription and even process and deliver it without my input. That is not so predictive; my 30 daily pills will run out in 30 days.

When Amazon suggests that I might like a product similar to other things I have bought, it's not very creepy. When I see an ad or suggestion from them about a product or even a topic that I was just searching on Google, THAT is creepy.

Similarly, Facebook might give me an ad or a "sponsored" post at the top of my feed because of my recent activity and the activity of friends that I follow - especially those that I interact with frequently with Likes, shares and comment. 

It would be interesting to see what the feeds look like for some friends of mine who are Facebook lurkers and who rarely post anything and seem to rarely even log into the site. What are they seeing when it comes to ads?

This early version of a CAPTCHA uses a nonsense word "smwm" and obscures it from computer interpretation by making it an image, twisting the letters and adding slight background color gradient.

CAPTCHA (/kæp.t??/ is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart"). It is the general name for a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. 

You have encountered them when logging into sites. The early versions were scrambled words as images. But they have become more complex. 

I suspect that the acronym was formed with the idea of capture+gotcha. That is especially true of a newer form known as an image identification captcha which may be better at fooling robots, but is also better at fooling and frustrating me.

For example, you may encounter ones asking you to "select all the images with a fire hydrant" in them.  (It could also be automobiles or road signs or...)

The problem with this type is that the images are small and low quality. On the example shown here I can't tell if there is a fire hydrant hiding in the image. And the captcha will keep giving me new ones if I'm not correct. The result? I give up at trying to use the service.

This user identification procedure has received criticism since it was first introduced in 2003. It certainly has accessibility issues for disabled people. But everyday users also balk at having to use it.

We use a simple version on this blog to try to prevent bots from posting spamming comments. That didn't work very well and we had to shut down commenting. We'll never know how many legitimate comments never were posted because the captcha stopped the commenter.

Do they work? I don't know their effectiveness score, but there approaches to defeating CAPTCHAs. The simplest is to use cheap human labor to recognize them. There are many algorithms and types out there now and some have bugs that have been exploited to allow the attacker to completely bypass the CAPTCHA. Good old AI and machine learning has allowed people to build automated solvers.

Is there a need for this technology? Yes. Anyone with a blog knows that spam comments are a problem. 

           The NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA

And then there is the "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA." In 2013, the updated reCAPTCHA began implementing behavioral analysis of the browser's interactions with the CAPTCHA to predict whether the user was a human or a bot before displaying the captcha, and presenting a "considerably more difficult" captcha in cases where it had reason to think the user might be a bot.

Public Google services started using it the following year. The first issue with its use was that because NoCAPTCHA relies on the use of Google cookies that are at least a few weeks old, reCAPTCHA has become nearly impossible to complete for people who frequently clear their cookies. An improved version introduced in 2017 by Google is called "invisible reCAPTCHA".

We will continue to make ways to block bots and people will continue to make ways to defeat them. A new project, Mailhide, is being developed to protect email addresses on web pages from being harvested by spammers. It converts the address that doesn't allow the bot to see the full email address, so "captcha@gmail.com" becomes "cap...@gmail.com". A human would have to click on it, and solve a CAPTCHA to see the full email address.

Can this be defeated by cheap human labor too? Yes. It's like putting a strong lock on your door. Someone can bust it if they are determined to get in, but you hope to discourage others.