Tag Archives: ethics

Separating the cyber from the crime in cybercrime

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The tool used to commit a crime might amplify harm and justify more severe punishment but it doesn’t change the nature of the crime.

A judge dropped the “cyberbullying” conviction against the woman who allegedly contributed to the suicide of a 13 year old girl.

The judge found the particular law she was prosecuted under, “illegally accessing a computer”, was unconstitutionally vague and could be applied to anyone who violated a social network’s terms and conditions.

The defendant says she never should have been prosecuted.

Here’s what she was accused of doing:

Prosecutors said Drew sought to humiliate Megan by helping create a fictitious teenage boy on the social networking site and by sending flirtatious messages to the girl in his name. The fake boy then dumped Megan in a message, saying the world would be better without her.

She hanged herself a short time later, in October 2006, in the St. Louis suburb of Dardenne Prairie, Mo.

If an adult, disguises him or herself as a teen and uses that false identity to approach a thirteen year old child for the purpose of manipulating and harming that child, isn’t that a crime?

If the direct result of those actions is mental anguish for that child — if the indirect result is the death of that child, isn’t that a crime?

If not, we need to reform our existing laws not distract ourselves coining a new “cybercrime” to describe people who happen to do this using MySpace.

Defendant Says Dismissal of MySpace Hoax Case Linked to Suicide Was ‘‘Proper’ – washingtonpost.com http://bit.ly/lyAoa

An MBA Oath – another non-profession’s search for a standard of ethical conduct

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There’s a movement among the students of the MBA program of Harvard Business School for an MBA Oath of ethical conduct. Read the oath here.

From a June 4th article in the Economist:

The student oath is part of a larger effort to turn management from a trade into a profession…

This is the exact debate going on in Software Development — emerging profession or craft?

One of the two main criticisms of the oath and of the whole idea of turning management into a profession, particularly in business-school faculties, is that it is either unnecessary or actively harmful… (by) promising to “safeguard the interests” of colleagues, customers, and society, are the future captains of industry simply short-changing their shareholders?

Defenders of the oath reply that the goal of maximising shareholder value has become a justification for short-termism and, in particular, rapid personal enrichment. They are concerned about managers doing things that drive up the share price quickly at the expense of a firm’s lasting health.

The second complaint is that the oath’s fine words are toothless.

Even these cheerleaders admit there are differences between practising management and, say, medicine. They concede that no self-regulating professional body for managers could possibly monopolise entry to the profession

DSC00689 by Ivana BrosnicWe can debate that a practice has ethical consequences, i.e. that it has a larger array of stakeholders who can be harmed or benefited by the daily decisions of practitioners – without calling for accreditation, lincensing, certification, standards bodies, and regulation.

Developers should consider end users, society and our common reputation even as managers consider long-term investors, employees, their industry and the larger economy.

Name a widespread activity that isn’t abetted/enabled by software systems. Even the debate over an MBA Oath:

As for punishing unprofessional behaviour, Mr Khurana (Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School) is inspired by the internet rather than by a closed council of grandees. From open-source software to eBay and Wikipedia, new systems of self-regulation are emerging based on openness, constant feedback and the wisdom of crowds. These could be adapted, he thinks, to provide effective scrutiny of managers.

If anything about this strikes you as not true, I’d love to hear why.

ContactPoint – Protecting the Children

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ContactPoint is a web accessible database containing identity information for all English children.

ContactPoint - Every Child MattersFrom the Department for Children, Schools and Families:

ContactPoint holds the following basic information for each child in England up until their 18th birthday:

  • name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number
  • name and contact details for each child’s parent or carer
  • contact details for services working with a child: as a minimum, educational settings such as schools and GP practices
  • contact details for other service providers where appropriate, for example health visitors or social workers; and whether practitioners are lead professionals and have undertaken assessments under the Common Assessment Framework (CAF). Please note these are not currently held on the system but will be added over time.

The new flow of information is intended to detect abuse and save children’s lives. According to the Financial Times:

It (ContactPoint) was first proposed after the 2003 Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who died after failures by social services.

Still the risks are alarming.

From the Times Online:

In March the Government admitted that it had uncovered problems in the system for shielding details of an estimated 55,000 vulnerable children. These include children who are victims of domestic violence, those in difficult adoptions or witness protection programmes and the children of the rich and famous, whose whereabouts may need to be kept secret.

However, there remain concerns about the security of the database, which was recently criticised by the Rowntree Trust as illegal under human rights and data protection laws.

Balancing the potential for benefit and harm can be incredibly difficult. Is the right answer obvious to you?

Automagic content aggregation

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From Huffington Post, Washington Times Runs Obama Girls’ Photo With Story About Murdered Chicago Kids

Editor John Solomon told Greg Sargent technology, not a person, was to blame.

“The theme engine, through automation, grabbed a photo it thought was relevant, and attached it to the story,” Solomon said, acknowledging that the photo had gone up without a person seeing it. “There was no editorial decision to run it. As soon as it was brought to our attention, we pulled it down.”

“There was no editorial decision to run it”??

Who decided to acquire/build a search algorithm to publish file photos without human oversight?

The example is outrageous but using loose tags to associate photos of people to stories of crime and human tragedy? Under what circumstances does this technical solution make journalistic sense?

Technology to blame? Not even the technologists. Doesn’t this newspaper have an editorial board?

How about applying the same standard of care to your online property that you’d use for print?

Mistakes happen but blaming your tools just betrays how unequipped you are to use them.

Technological fiasco enablement

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From Gothamist, “NYU Accidentally Makes Fools Out of 489 Prospectives”

NYU sent an email to nearly 500 students this week that they should pack their bags and get ready to make their way over to Greenwich Village this fall as members of Wagner School’s next graduate class. An hour later, the school sent another email telling those same students to scratch that—they were actually rejected.