, Slate; Why Won’t John Roberts Accept an Ethics Code for Supreme Court Justices?
"Supreme Court justices also face ethics questions. Is it permissible for justices to provide anonymous leaks to the press about their private conferences? May they criticize political candidates, speak at meetings of partisan legal organizations, or raise funds for charities? May they vacation with litigants in the middle of a pending case or comment on legal issues or proceedings in lower courts? May clerks and court staff be assigned
to work on the justices’ private books and memoirs? These are not
hypotheticals. At least one justice has engaged in each of these
activities in past years, and there is no definitive code of conduct
that prohibits them."
Showing posts with label Codes of Ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Codes of Ethics. Show all posts
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Sunday, January 6, 2019
2019 is the year to stop talking about ethics and start taking action: Here’s how.; Fast Company, January 4, 2019
Katharine Schwab, Fast Company;
"Do take a class (or just read the news)
There’s a better way to help designers and engineers act more ethically when developing technology–educate them.
That’s the idea behind a series of ethical tech classes that have sprung up in places like Carnegie Mellon University, where computer science professor Fei Fang began teaching a class called Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. The idea: If computer science students can learn to think about the potential impact of their code, they’ll be more likely to make ethical decisions. The Mozilla Foundation is also throwing its weight behind this idea, with a multi-year competition that offers cash prizes to encourage professors to come up with ways of teaching ethics to computer science students that won’t make them fall asleep at their desks.
As for folks who are out of school: Take an online class. Or just read the news. As the North Carolina State University study on codes of ethics pointed out, developers who were more informed about current events were more likely to make more responsible decisions about how to develop technology compared to those without knowledge of those events."
2019 is the year to stop talking about ethics and start taking action
Here’s how.
"With so little oversight from regulators and continued poor judgment on the part of big companies, both consumers and makers of tech were asking: What does it mean to develop technology in an ethical way?
So far, that question has instigated a lot of talk, but 2019 is the year to take action. How? Here are seven do’s and don’ts for any company or individual dedicated to developing ethical technology in 2019..."Do take a class (or just read the news)
There’s a better way to help designers and engineers act more ethically when developing technology–educate them.
That’s the idea behind a series of ethical tech classes that have sprung up in places like Carnegie Mellon University, where computer science professor Fei Fang began teaching a class called Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. The idea: If computer science students can learn to think about the potential impact of their code, they’ll be more likely to make ethical decisions. The Mozilla Foundation is also throwing its weight behind this idea, with a multi-year competition that offers cash prizes to encourage professors to come up with ways of teaching ethics to computer science students that won’t make them fall asleep at their desks.
As for folks who are out of school: Take an online class. Or just read the news. As the North Carolina State University study on codes of ethics pointed out, developers who were more informed about current events were more likely to make more responsible decisions about how to develop technology compared to those without knowledge of those events."
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Why you need a code of ethics (and how to build one that sticks); CIO, September 17, 2018
Josh Fruhlinger, CIO; Why you need a code of ethics (and how to build one that sticks)
"Importance of a code of ethics
Most of us probably think of ourselves as ethical people. But within organizations built to maximize profits, many seemingly inevitably drift towards more dubious behavior, especially when it comes to user personal data. "More companies than not are collecting data just for the sake of collecting data, without having any reason as to why or what to do with it," says Philip Jones, a GDPR regulatory compliance expert at Capgemini. "Although this is an expensive and unethical approach, most businesses don’t think twice about it. I view this approach as one of the highest risks to companies today, because they have no clue where, how long, or how accurate much of their private data is on consumers."
This is the sort of organizational ethical drift that can arise in the absence of clear ethical guidelines—and it's the sort of drift that laws like the GDPR, the EU's stringent new framework for how companies must handle customer data, are meant to counter."
"Importance of a code of ethics
Most of us probably think of ourselves as ethical people. But within organizations built to maximize profits, many seemingly inevitably drift towards more dubious behavior, especially when it comes to user personal data. "More companies than not are collecting data just for the sake of collecting data, without having any reason as to why or what to do with it," says Philip Jones, a GDPR regulatory compliance expert at Capgemini. "Although this is an expensive and unethical approach, most businesses don’t think twice about it. I view this approach as one of the highest risks to companies today, because they have no clue where, how long, or how accurate much of their private data is on consumers."
This is the sort of organizational ethical drift that can arise in the absence of clear ethical guidelines—and it's the sort of drift that laws like the GDPR, the EU's stringent new framework for how companies must handle customer data, are meant to counter."
Saturday, August 18, 2018
What Are “Ethics in Design”?; Slate, August 13, 2018
Victoria, Sgarro, Slate; What Are “Ethics in Design”?
"Examples of product design that fail on the ethics front are all too easy to find—like news feeds promoting fake news, ride-hailing companies psychologically exploiting workers, and virtual home assistants perpetuating negative gender stereotypes. It’s not that product designers don’t care about the ethical ramifications of their work—far from it. It’s that, too often, they assume that such considerations fall outside of their job description
Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design and author of the influential essay “A Designer’s Code of Ethics,” says that this ignorance has become an issue with the rapid change in scope of design over the past decade. “Designers have been running fast and free with no ethical guidelines,” he told me. “And that was fine when we were designing posters and sites for movies. But now design is interpersonal relationships on social media, health care, financial data traveling everywhere, the difference between verified journalism and fake news. And this is dangerous.”
Increasingly, though, the industry is taking ethics seriously. Every year at SXSW, John Maeda, the global head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, presents the “Design in Tech Report,” which serves as a kind of State of the Union on design in technology. This year, Maeda focused on inclusion as the future of design. Maeda defines inclusive design as designing products for a broader audience—whether that’s people with disabilities, people living outside of the U.S., people of color, or older people. On his list of “the top 10 most critical issues and challenges currently facing design,” “ethics in design” came in third, behind “design not having a ‘seat at the table’ ” (No. 1), and “diversity in design and tech” (No. 2)."
"Examples of product design that fail on the ethics front are all too easy to find—like news feeds promoting fake news, ride-hailing companies psychologically exploiting workers, and virtual home assistants perpetuating negative gender stereotypes. It’s not that product designers don’t care about the ethical ramifications of their work—far from it. It’s that, too often, they assume that such considerations fall outside of their job description
Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design and author of the influential essay “A Designer’s Code of Ethics,” says that this ignorance has become an issue with the rapid change in scope of design over the past decade. “Designers have been running fast and free with no ethical guidelines,” he told me. “And that was fine when we were designing posters and sites for movies. But now design is interpersonal relationships on social media, health care, financial data traveling everywhere, the difference between verified journalism and fake news. And this is dangerous.”
Increasingly, though, the industry is taking ethics seriously. Every year at SXSW, John Maeda, the global head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, presents the “Design in Tech Report,” which serves as a kind of State of the Union on design in technology. This year, Maeda focused on inclusion as the future of design. Maeda defines inclusive design as designing products for a broader audience—whether that’s people with disabilities, people living outside of the U.S., people of color, or older people. On his list of “the top 10 most critical issues and challenges currently facing design,” “ethics in design” came in third, behind “design not having a ‘seat at the table’ ” (No. 1), and “diversity in design and tech” (No. 2)."
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Ethics, Quants and Cold-Calling; Bloomberg, May 25, 2017
Matt Levine, Bloomberg;
"Ethics.
Ethics, Quants and Cold-Calling
"Ethics.
I used to be a lawyer, and lawyers have a code of ethics. Now I am a journalist, and journalists have a code of ethics. One thing that strikes me about these codes is that they are opposites. Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a lawyer is that your obligations are to your client, and you have to act in her best interests, even if that is against the interests of accuracy; legal ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle. Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a journalist is that your obligations are to the public, and you should be accurate even if that is against the interests of the people you talk to; journalistic ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle. In both cases the exceptions are huge and important: You're not supposed to lie to the public as a lawyer, or mislead your sources as a journalist, etc; none of this is meant to be any sort of ethical advice. But if someone says to you "oh yeah I murdered someone," as a lawyer, your baseline expected response would be not to tell anyone; as a journalist, your baseline expected response would be to tell everyone.
Obviously these opposite rules make sense in their respective contexts; the role of a lawyer is different from that of a journalist, and each profession's ethics are well adapted to doing their jobs usefully. Still it is weird to think of them as "ethics." They are both functional systems adapted to the work of their professions, not absolute moral-ethical rules handed down by a higher power. Keeping a murderer's secret is not absolutely ethical for humans, and disclosing that secret is not absolutely ethical for humans; each is ethical or unethical depending on its social context."
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