Data scandal is huge blow for Facebook – and efforts to study its impact on society; Guardian, March 18, 2018

Olivia Solon, Guardian; Data scandal is huge blow for Facebook – and efforts to study its impact on society

"The revelation that 50 million people had their Facebook profiles harvested so Cambridge Analytica could target them with political ads is a huge blow to the social network that raises questions about its approach to data protection and disclosure.

As Facebook executives wrangle on Twitter over the semantics of whether this constitutes a “breach”, the result for users is the same: personal data extracted from the platform and used for a purpose to which they did not consent.

Facebook has a complicated track record on privacy. Its business model is built on gathering data. It knows your real name, who your friends are, your likes and interests, where you have been, what websites you have visited, what you look like and how you speak."

Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study; Agence France-Presse in Paris via Guardian, August 7, 2017

Agence France-Presse in Paris via Guardian; Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study

"“It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias,” the study’s co-author, Will Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said.

“I suspect that this stems from the prevalence of deeply entrenched pro-religious norms. Even in places that are currently quite overtly secular, people still seem to intuitively hold on to the believe that religion is a moral safeguard.”

Only in Finland and New Zealand, two secular countries, did the experiment not yield conclusive evidence of anti-atheist prejudice, said the team."

CMU lands $10M gift to study ethical issues in robotics, technology; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/7/16

David Templeton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; CMU lands $10M gift to study ethical issues in robotics, technology:

"Current law doesn’t yet specify who’s at fault should a driverless car crash cause human injury. Ethical issues, for now, also remain unresolved over the use and consequences of smart weaponry...

Moral principles long have guided interactions and behavior on multiple human levels and those ethics have extended to animals, nature and the entire planet. But a modern-day moral quandary involves human interaction with machines — and particularly the smart ones.

Those issues, known as robo-ethics and artificial-intelligence ethics, will command even greater attention at Carnegie Mellon University with a $10 million gift from K&L Gates LLP, a global law firm based in Pittsburgh, to establish the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies at the university."

Teaching business ethics; University World News, 9/23/16

Margaret Andrews, University World News; Teaching business ethics:

"I’m not sure that some of these are universal values, but, nonetheless, both sources point to ambiguity and that ethics is not always dealing with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but may sometimes be a choice of a lesser of evils, a nuanced decision dealing with trade-offs or viewed as situational. Hence some of the problems we have in teaching ethics – and getting people, ourselves included, acting in an ethical manner...

So how can we improve our students’ ethical decision making? Good question. EthicalSystems.org, a not-for-profit organisation housed at New York University, collects and shares research on ethics that hopes to demonstrate that “in the long run, good ethics is good business”.

The research is really interesting and spans a wide variety of topics, including accounting, cheating and honesty, contextual influences, corporate culture, corporate governance, corruption, decision-making, leadership and teaching ethics, among others. The site also offers activities and cases on how to teach ethics, as well as a host of resources in this area.

How does your school teach ethics? What works and what is just wishful thinking? How might we approach the problem differently? How might we better instil ethics in students – and the broader business community?"

Sci-Hub Controversy Triggers Publishers’ Critique of Librarian; Library Journal, 8/25/16

Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Sci-Hub Controversy Triggers Publishers’ Critique of Librarian:

"“I was surprised that AAP would take the tactic of trying to say ‘don’t talk about Sci-Hub,’ as if ignoring the problem, or not shining light on it, would make it go away,” Joseph told LJ. “That seems kind of a backwards way to approach this issue to me, because what we’re seeing, frankly, is Sci-Hub really growing in popularity.”

Sci-Hub’s various clashes with the world of scholarly publishing, Joseph noted, is helping to raise awareness of the issues surrounding journal access outside the library walls. “It’s not just a library problem…. When researchers are going to the lengths of using an illegal resource to get access, I think it’s really showing institutions that it’s not a departmental problem. It’s an institutional problem.”

And the problem doesn’t only lie within academia, Gardner added. As a member of ALA, he said, it would be unethical for him to promote Sci-Hub’s use given the constraints of the legal system. “But I do think that copyright is far too strong, and that the system is in need of reform. The reason why services like Sci-Hub exist is because we have a copyright system which is too draconian.”

“This is an area where tempers run high, and I think that reasonable people can disagree,” he said. “There are a lot of people, scholars and librarians, who think that using Sci-Hub is civil disobedience and I’m personally very sympathetic to that argument. But it’s also obvious to me that under the current legal system, this is totally illegal.”

Gardner is working on research that he will present at ACRL’s 2017 conference, again using data from the Science survey to examine Sci-Hub’s potential impact on inter-library loan practices."

There’s No Such Thing as Innocuous Personal Data; Slate, 8/8/16

Elizabeth Weingarten, Slate; There’s No Such Thing as Innocuous Personal Data:

"The way you walk can be as unique as your fingerprint; a couple of studies show that gait can help verify the identity of smartphone users. And gait can also predict whether someone is at risk for dementia. Seemingly useless pieces of data may let experts deduce or predict certain behaviors or conditions now, but the big insights will come in the next few years, when companies and consumers are able to view a tapestry of different individual data points and contrast them with data across the entire population. That’s when, according to a recent report from Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, we’ll be able to “gain deep insight into human emotional experiences.”

But it’s the data that you’re creating now that will fuel those insights. Far from meaningless, it’s the foundation of what you (and everyone else) may be able to learn about your future self."

Librarians Protest Canada Cutbacks; Chronicle of Higher Education via New York Times, 1/26/14

Karen Birchard and Jennifer Lewington, Chronicle of Higher Education via New York Times; Librarians Protest Canada Cutbacks:

"A move by the Canadian government to shrink the number of its departmental research libraries is drawing fire from some academics, who fear a loss of data and trained personnel and damage to the country’s ability to carry out research.

The closing of seven regional libraries in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the quiet elimination of more than two dozen libraries in other departments, might otherwise have passed largely unnoticed, given the modest cost savings...

Gail Shea, head of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, or D.F.O., adamantly denied any book burning. “Our government values these collections and will continue to strongly support it by continuing to add new material on an ongoing basis,” she said in a statement. “All materials for which D.F.O. has copyright will be preserved by the department.”

Despite such assurances, some academic researchers and librarians remain skeptical.

“My overwhelming feeling is that we don’t know exactly what some of the ramifications are for my future research or other people’s research because of the nonsystematic way it has been done,” said John Reynolds, a professor of aquatic ecology at Simon Fraser University who uses federal government fisheries data on British Columbia streams for his study of salmon sustainability.

He questioned why the government had failed to publish an inventory of library materials before and after the downsizing, including documents not covered by copyright."

Opting to Blow the Whistle or Choosing to Walk Away; New York Times, 9/20/13

Alina Tugend, New York Times; Opting to Blow the Whistle or Choosing to Walk Away: "WHISTLE-BLOWERS have been big news lately — from Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, to Edward J. Snowden. Yet, for most people, the question of whether to expose unethical or illegal activities at work doesn’t make headlines or involve state secrets. Stephen Kohn, of the National Whistleblowers Center, says true whistle-blowing is when people report seeing something that is against the law. But that doesn’t make the problem less of a quandary. The question of when to remain quiet and when to speak out — and how to do it — can be extraordinarily difficult no matter what the situation. And while many think of ethics violations as confined to obviously illegal acts, like financial fraud or safety violations, the line often can be much blurrier and, therefore, more difficult to navigate. According to the Ethics Resource Center, a nonprofit research organization, the No. 1 misconduct observed — by a third of 4,800 respondents — was misuse of company time. That was closely followed by abusive behavior and lying to employees. The findings were published in the organization’s 2011 National Business Ethics Survey, which interviewed, on the phone or online, employees in the commercial sector who were employed at least 20 hours a week."