T3THICS Week 16: Back To School Surveillance
T3THICS is back and better than ever, but unfortunately so is surveillance tech!
T3THICS is a weekly roundup of the latest news & spicy conversations from the responsible tech space. Curation & analysis is brought to you by Monika Viktorova & Marta Janczarski, & SEO wizardry by Monika Kardyś.
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Hello! We’re back from our European OOO & we hope you missed us! Before we jump into this week’s links, a quick word about our soft relaunch and what to expect going forward. We’re excited to introduce you to the newest member of our team: Monika Kardyś who is a social media and SEO wiz, and will be helping us scale this newsletter with hashtag magic. We’ve got a new look and streamlined our content: you can expect a shorter, punchier list of weekly links to give you only the critical highlights. Plus, we have some exciting ideas for new kinds of features going forward, so stay tuned!
If you read through the newsletter and still want more, we also talk about responsible tech on our other channels which are linked in our bio (at the risk of context collapse, kindly note that the opinions we share here and elsewhere are solely our own). Please reach out - we’re friendly and we love a good T3THICS chat. And with that, let’s dive in!
Monika’s Links:
Just in time for the back-to-school rush, let’s talk about student monitoring. Students who have access to school computers are often surveilled by algorithms like edusoftware that purports to be keeping them safe by “flagging” problematic online behavior. But this lack of privacy can actually make teens vulnerable to abuse from the adults around them - the school administrators, teachers and librarians who have access to the search results.
Speaking of kids’ privacy being violated by adults, this thread makes a great link from the themes in Jeannette McCurdy’s new book to the modern version of stage moms mining their kids’ lives for content. There have already been lawsuits from kids trying to fight their parents for a modicum of privacy, but if you want to hear from someone who’s lived it, here’s a heartfelt video from a TikTok user who was caught in the (social media) spotlight as a kid
On the topic of tracking, workplaces are trying to implement increasingly draconian “productivity” trackers as well, which come with serious questions about accuracy, effectiveness and ethics.
And tracking doesn’t just stop at the workplace - Amazon wants to use Roombas to make maps of all of our homes!
This interview with Timnit Gebru by Kim Vinnell is also a must watch this week.
One of the big stories over the last couple of weeks has been the outcry over Instagram’s pivot to video (supposedly in a bid to compete with TikTok). A petition was started to “make Instagram Instagram again”, even the Kardashians weighed in, but the CEO claimed his hands were tied because video content just performs better. But are we even sure the people making the product know what we want OR need?
Northeastern University has a brand new AI Ethics Advisory Board. Neat to see these popping up in more organizations!
I leave y’all with this Signal in the Noise tweet of the week:
Marta’s Links:
Twitter Circle has gone live! This feature allows users to create a select group of 150 followers that will see tweets specifically for them, similarly to the “close friends" feature on Instagram. It seems like in the climate of polarizing opinions, particularly Twitter, being able to have a not so public forum has its advantages.
A new law has been proposed in New York. The New York City AI bias law, which goes into effect January 2023, will penalize employers for any bias detected in AI hiring tools. This is a challenge for employers as auditing for bias is not a standardized set of requirements.
An AI generated digital print has won an art competition, and critics aren’t happy. The category was for “digitally manipulated photography”, and no one had initially even noticed that the print wasn’t a photograph! The realistic image was generated by Midjourney, and has further fueled the discussion whether AI should be used as a tool in art, or if it defies the very definition of art.
One could argue that the most powerful position is not the one who decides, but the one who decides who is going to decide. This has been assessed and analyzed through the lens of historical political decisions, corporate case studies and liability court cases. But what about in AI? Who gets to decide who decides? This article gives a snapshot of the landscape, comparing it with other established fields such as foundational physics.
Anti Trust has made it to late night television; John Oliver’s main segment focused on tech company monopolies and the upcoming US bills to improve anti trust.
AI is sentient; a Google researcher has been suspended after publicly revealing his conversations with LaMDA, a Google AI system, as evidence that AI can in fact become sentient.
All tech is human released a fantastic summer reading list, which includes fiction and non-fiction, so for anyone looking for post-vacation reads, they’ll be sure to find something there.