Ethics Hotline available to Ohio University employees; Ohio University, Ohio News, December 5, 2022

Ohio University, Ohio News; Ethics Hotline available to Ohio University employees

"The following message was shared with Ohio University faculty and staff on Monday, Dec. 5, 2022

Dear Ohio University employees,

Promoting a responsible and ethical workplace is everyone’s responsibility. For more than 16 years, Ohio University has demonstrated its commitment to this principle by contracting with EthicsPoint® to provide the Ohio University Ethics Hotline. The hotline can be used to report concerns of fraud, waste, abuse, or non-compliance with regulations or University policies—anonymously if so desired. This process is managed by the Office of Audit, Risk, and Compliance, and additional information can be found on the Office’s website(opens in a new window). 

Members of the University community may submit an anonymous report one of two ways: through a toll-free number or through a web-intake process on any computer or mobile device. Reports made to the hotline—via phone or website—are triaged and responded to by anonymous dialogue between the reporter, Audit, Legal Affairs, or the University representative who can most appropriately respond to the concern.

The University encourages employees to report concerns through normal lines of communication, such as to a supervisor or to an office or individual whose responsibility it is to handle such reports. However, when employees are uncomfortable doing so, the hotline offers an alternative for filing concerns anonymously. The University prohibits retaliation against an individual who in good faith reports concerns or provides information about suspected University-related misconduct, whether reported through normal channels or through the hotline. 

If you have concerns about possible fraud, waste, abuse of University assets, or other compliance or regulatory issues, you can file a report from any computer or mobile device on the Ohio University Ethics Hotline(opens in a new window), or by calling EthicsPoint toll-free at (866) 294-9591. 

While investigations are conducted in a highly confidential manner, it should be noted that records generated during an investigation may be subject to disclosure in accordance with applicable laws, including Ohio’s Public Records Act. The University is also required by Ohio law to make the University community aware of an additional fraud hotline maintained by the Ohio Auditor of State. This additional hotline resource is available by calling (866) 372-8364. 

Thank you for doing your part in creating an open and ethical culture here at Ohio University. 

Marion L. Candrea
Chief Audit Executive"

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration; The New York Times, September 5, 2018

Anonymous, The New York Times;

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

 

[Kip Currier: The New York Times' controversial decision to publish on September 5, 2018 an anonymous Op-Ed essay penned by a "senior official" within the Trump administration, triggers a rash of thought-stirring, thorny ethical questions:

Chief among them: What were the considerations in deciding whether to permit the senior official to publish the Op-Ed essay anonymously? (--And did The Times and "Anonymous" discuss revealing the individual's identity at some point in the future?)]

Who were the stakeholders that were and were not considered by The Times' editorial staff in making this decision?

What roles are The Times' editorial staff assuming in publishing this piece by Anonymous?

Has The Times communicated sufficient transparency about its editorial decision-making?]

"The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here...."

[Excerpt]

"The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making."

When You Become The Person You Hate On The Internet; NPR, All Tech Considered, 3/29/16

[Podcast, 6 min. 27 sec.] Sarah Hepola, NPR, All Tech Considered; When You Become The Person You Hate On The Internet:

"For years, I've complained about the random hatred of the Internet. It was the worst part of writing online: Show up with your heart in your hand, and a bunch of strangers line up to throw rocks in your face. I was so freaked out by comments on my own stories that I had once considered not writing at all anymore. I badly wanted a thicker skin, but I also knew I had become a writer because I was thin-skinned. I took on other people's discomfort, and I flinched at the tiniest finger flick of rejection. I was a sensitive person — but I had just done a very insensitive thing.

I would never have said this to his face. But technology is such a bait and switch, giving you the feel of anonymity at the very moment your words have the farthest reach. And my comment was exactly the kind of random stone-throwing that had wounded me over the years".

Wildly Popular App Kik Offers Teenagers, and Predators, Anonymity; New York Times, 2/5/16

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times; Wildly Popular App Kik Offers Teenagers, and Predators, Anonymity:

"...experts in Internet crime caution that the app is just one of many digital platforms abused by all manner of criminals, from small-time drug dealers to terrorists.

But law enforcement officials say Kik — used by 40 percent of American teenagers, by the company’s own estimate — goes further than most widely used apps in shielding its users from view, often making it hard for investigators to know who is using it, or how. (Yik Yak is another popular app under fire for its use of anonymous messages.)...

Founded in 2009 and based in Canada, Kik aspires to become the Western version of WeChat, the hugely successful messaging service in China that offers free texting, e-commerce and content delivery. Its main appeal is privacy and anonymity: The app is free, and allows people to find strangers and communicate with them anonymously, through a user name."

Facebook adjusts controversial 'real name' policy in wake of criticism; Guardian, 12/15/15

Amanda Holpuch, Guardian; Facebook adjusts controversial 'real name' policy in wake of criticism:

"Facebook unveiled changes to its controversial “real name” policy on Tuesday after criticism from transgender people and victims of domestic abuse.

The social network bans anonymity and has insisted people use their birth names on their accounts. The policy has caused problems for people who used different names from the one they were born with, including transgender people and victims of domestic violence who use aliases to hide from their abusers...

Critics grew to include rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union of California and Human Rights Watch. They formed the Nameless Coalition to protest the policy because it “has facilitated harassment, silencing, and even physical violence towards its most vulnerable users”."

Researchers wrestle with a privacy problem; Nature, 9/22/15

Erika Check Hayden, Nature; Researchers wrestle with a privacy problem:

"But for many social scientists, the most impressive thing was that the authors had been able to examine US federal tax returns: a closely guarded data set that was then available to researchers only with tight restrictions. This has made the study an emblem for both the challenges and the enormous potential power of 'administrative data' — information collected during routine provision of services, including tax returns, records of welfare benefits, data on visits to doctors and hospitals, and criminal records. Unlike Internet searches, social-media posts and the rest of the digital trails that people establish in their daily lives, administrative data cover entire populations with minimal self-selection effects: in the US census, for example, everyone sampled is required by law to respond and tell the truth.

This puts administrative data sets at the frontier of social science, says John Friedman, an economist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the lead authors of the education study1. “They allow researchers to not just get at old questions in a new way,” he says, “but to come at problems that were completely impossible before.”...

But there is also concern that the rush to use these data could pose new threats to citizens' privacy. “The types of protections that we're used to thinking about have been based on the twin pillars of anonymity and informed consent, and neither of those hold in this new world,” says Julia Lane, an economist at New York University. In 2013, for instance, researchers showed that they could uncover the identities of supposedly anonymous participants in a genetic study simply by cross-referencing their data with publicly available genealogical information."

The Need To Be Anonymous: Empowering and liberating free expression; Library Journal, 9/8/15

John N. Berry III, Library Journal; The Need To Be Anonymous: Empowering and liberating free expression:

"I’m always surprised when librarians who read LJ complain because we allow anonymous comments to be published or posted. In a message on our Feedback page, Andrea Segall, a retired librarian who worked at the Berkeley Public Library, CA, and is involved in a protest against that library’s current weeding practices and program, takes LJ to task for allowing anonymous comment.

“I’m disappointed that LJ permits this cowardly method of communication. People should be required to identify themselves when submitting opinions and information,” writes Segall...

Anonymity is as American as the Fourth of July. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which incited our revolution, was first published anonymously.

Yes, anonymity can frequently hide the biases and prejudices of those who comment. It can allow parties who have a major stake in the outcome of debates to hide that fact. The anonymous can, and often do, use language and make charges that are stronger and more snarky. But there can be as much misinformation in signed comments as there is in unsigned ones. We are smart enough to figure out the misinformation and hyperbole in either. The added accountability of messages from identified speakers is hardly as valuable as the open expression empowered by allowing commenters to remain anonymous. It can even improve the debate, by forcing commenters to focus on the merits—or lack thereof—of the argument itself rather than on who said what."

Online ‘Swatting’ Becomes a Hazard for Popular Video Gamers and Police Responders; New York Times, 3/20/15

Nick Wingfield, New York Times; Online ‘Swatting’ Becomes a Hazard for Popular Video Gamers and Police Responders:

"Swatting has become enough of a drain on local resources that the state’s attorney for Will County in Illinois, James W. Glasgow, recently proposed state legislation that would require defendants found guilty of swatting to pay back municipalities for calling on emergency responders. Swatting victims say they have been able to prevent repeated raids at their homes by asking the police to note in records available to emergency dispatchers that they are likely targets.

Tracking the culprits behind the pranks is difficult. While bomb scares and other hoaxes have been around for decades, making threats anonymously has never been so easy.

Swatters use text messages and online phone services like Skype to relay their threats, employing techniques to make themselves hard to trace. They obtain personal addresses for their victims through property records and other public databases, or by tricking businesses or customer service representatives at a victim’s Internet provider into revealing the information."

Popular Yik Yak App Confers Anonymity and Delivers Abuse; New York Times, 3/8/15

Jonathan Mahler, New York Times; Popular Yik Yak App Confers Anonymity and Delivers Abuse:

"Eastern Michigan is one of a number of universities whose campus has been roiled by offensive “yaks.” Since the app’s introduction a little more than a year ago, it has been used to issue threats of mass violence on more than a dozen college campuses, including the University of North Carolina, Michigan State University and Penn State. Racist, homophobic and misogynist “yaks” have generated controversy at many more, among them Clemson, Emory, Colgate and the University of Texas. At Kenyon College, a “yakker” proposed a gang rape at the school’s women’s center...

“Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps,” said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.” “It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way.”

Colleges are largely powerless to deal with the havoc Yik Yak is wreaking. The app’s privacy policy prevents schools from identifying users without a subpoena, court order or search warrant, or an emergency request from a law-enforcement official with a compelling claim of imminent harm. Schools can block access to Yik Yak on their Wi-Fi networks, but banning a popular social media network is controversial in its own right, arguably tantamount to curtailing freedom of speech. And as a practical matter, it doesn’t work anyway. Students can still use the app on their phones with their cell service."

Is the Internet a Mob Without Consequence?; New York Times, 12/24/13

Nick Bilton, New York Times; Is the Internet a Mob Without Consequence? : "Ms. Sacco was tried and judged guilty in a public square of millions and soon attacked in a way that seemed worse than her original statement. Within hours, people threatened to rape, shoot, kill and torture her. The mob found her Facebook and Instagram accounts and began threatening the same perils on photos she had posted of friends and family. Not satisfied, people began threatening her family directly. The incident was a trending topic on Twitter and a huge forum thread on Reddit. This all happened while Ms. Sacco was on a 12-hour flight without Wi-Fi to Africa. When she landed, it was game over. She deleted her entire social footprint online, including her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and was fired from her job, effective 12 hours earlier. “This default to hate, this automatic mockery and derision, needs to be viewed with the same hatred as Sacco’s tweet,” wrote Tauriq Moosa, a tutor in ethics, bioethics and critical thinking at the University of Cape Town, South Africa."

Advocacy group asks conventions to ‘protect our secret identities’; ComicBookResoruces.com, 10/15/13

Kevin Melrose, ComicBookResources.com; Advocacy group asks conventions to ‘protect our secret identities’ : "In response to New York Comic Con’s controversial use of attendees’ Twitter accounts to send promotional messages, and the implementation of technology allowing organizers to track individual badges, a staff member for a leading digital-rights group has written an open letter asking all pop-culture conventions to “protect our secret identities.” “You can still have a convention at the cutting edge of culture, without bleeding your attendees’ privacy away,” wrote David Maass, media relations coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The twin issues are linked to radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, implemented by NYCC this year in an effort to clamp down on fraudulent badges and badge-sharing among exhibitors."

Cheating’s Surprising Thrill; New York Times, 10/7/13

Jan Hoffman, New York Times; Cheating’s Surprising Thrill: "When was the last time you cheated? Not on the soul-scorching magnitude of, say, Bernie Madoff, Lance Armstrong or John Edwards. Just nudge-the-golf-ball cheating. Maybe you rounded up numbers on an expense report. Let your eyes wander during a high-stakes exam. Or copied a friend’s expensive software. And how did you feel afterward? You may recall nervousness, a twinge of guilt. But new research shows that as long as you didn’t think your cheating hurt anyone, you may have felt great. The discomfort you remember feeling then may actually be a response rewritten now by your inner moral authority, your “should” voice. Unethical behavior is increasingly studied by psychologists and management specialists. They want to understand what prompts people to abrogate core values, why cheating appears to be on the rise, and what interventions can be made. To find a powerful tool to turn people toward ethical decisions, many researchers have focused on the guilt that many adults feel after cheating. So some behavioral ethics researchers were startled by a study published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by researchers at the University of Washington, the London Business School, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The title: “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior.”"