Open Access: On Learning I Won’t Die Of My Grandmother’s Disease; The Georgetown Voice, April 7, 2018

Rebecca Zaritsky, The Georgetown Voice; Open Access: On Learning I Won’t Die Of My Grandmother’s Disease

[Kip Currier: This past week's Information Ethics course module explored and reflected on the pluses and minuses of DNA testing. This article is a thought-provoking first-person account of one person's 23andMe DNA test results.

The author raises some positive aspects of genetic testing, as well as some potential downsides. She offers a "go-between" strategy for mitigating those possible impacts, concluding that "It’s not fair to the patients to expose them to information without an explanation."

Lots of practical challenges and legal and ethical questions are raised by the writer's suggested remedy though, regarding who, when, and how someone would make the grey decisions about what constitutes "serious medical information that affects the individual’s life" and what constitutes "non-medical or “trivia” information". Who would bear responsibility for making these "tough calls"? Who or what entities would be charged with oversight and enforcement?

No easy answers. But the author raises important questions for  law- and policymakers, ethicists, and consumers about the implications of this increasingly touted technology and information tool.]

"The results were, generally speaking, good news. A gene for hypertension doesn’t scare me, and if I die of heart disease, at least I’ll still die as me. I was excited, intrigued, and overall relaxed by what I found. In hindsight, I’m only sorry I waited so long.

Still, what if that hadn’t been my experience? What if I did have copies of APOE4, or a mutation in a familial Alzheimer’s gene, or another disorder that nothing could be done about? I could have found out some serious, life-changing information for only $10 and a couple of clicks. Would I have been able to deal with that? I can’t say for certain. Not everyone who does these tests will have the same outcome as I will, and some will undoubtedly find information they weren’t prepared for and didn’t want. If I found out I had a mutation in BRCA, a gene conferring a high-risk for breast cancer, would I have spent my whole life worrying?

More commonly, there’s the potential for misinterpretation."

The Ethics Of Tech; NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday, April 7, 2018

NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday; The Ethics Of Tech

"NPR's Scott Detrow talks with former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger. He argues the tech industry should operate with a "higher standard for care."

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be facing tough questions when he appears before Congress in the coming days. At the top of the list, the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. That's the company that's been accused of improperly obtaining data from millions of Facebook users, then using that information for its work on political campaigns, reportedly including the Trump campaign.

Let's hear now from someone with a long history in Silicon Valley. Yonatan Zunger, the former Google engineer, recently wrote in The Boston Globe that this scandal is just more evidence that the entire tech industry faces an ethical crisis..."

So 2 Goats Were Stuck On A Beam Under A Bridge ...; NPR, Goats and Soda, April 6, 2018

Marc Silver, NPR, Goats and Soda; So 2 Goats Were Stuck On A Beam Under A Bridge ...

[Kip Currier: Amidst many "heavy" and thorny ethics-related stories/topics lately, here's a feel-good story about compassion, ingenuity, and persistence, from right here in Western Pennsylvania.
--May make your palms sweat a bit, picturing these unshrinking Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Samaritans and two plucky goats...]

""The initial plan was to try and separate the goats so we could could grab the goat facing the wrong way and turn it around," McCarthy says. But the white goat wasn't cooperating.

"I said, 'I'm going for it,' " he recalls. "I grabbed the goat as tight as I could." And he lifted it into the bucket.

The white goat was deposited on the bridge and handed over to its owner's son. McCarthy then tapped the beam with a pole to encourage the brown goat to make its way back.

Asked about the possible cost of the rescue, Tilson says, "We didn't even calculate it. We were just trying to be a good neighbor and get the goats back safely."

McCarthy is a happy man. "In this day and age, when things can go terribly wrong," he says, "it was great to see things go right."

His success is a testimony to a value that is sometimes lost in our quick-attention-span age: persistence.

"There was no way," he says, "I was letting go of that goat."

Meanwhile, no word on how the goats are faring, but I'm sure they would agree with a classic proverb from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: "The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid.""

Without data-targeted ads, Facebook would look like a pay service, Sandberg says; NBC, April 5, 2018

Alex Johnson and Erik Ortiz, NBC; Without data-targeted ads, Facebook would look like a pay service, Sandberg says

"The data of users is the lifeblood of Facebook, and if people want to opt out of all of the platform's data-driven advertising, they would have to pay for it, Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, told NBC News in an interview that aired Friday.

In an interview with "Today" co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, Sandberg again acknowledged that the company mishandled the breach that allowed Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm that worked with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, to harvest information from as many as 87 million Facebook users."

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On Data Privacy Fail: 'We Were Way Too Idealistic'; NPR, April 5, 2018

Vanessa Romo, NPR; Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg On Data Privacy Fail: 'We Were Way Too Idealistic'

[Kip Currier: Interesting Public Relations strategy that Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg tested out with NPR.
What do you think--was it "idealistic" naivete, careless indifference, an intentional component of Facebook's business model and strategic planning, willful blindness, negligence, and/or something else?]

""We really believed in social experiences. We really believed in protecting privacy. But we were way too idealistic. We did not think enough about the abuse cases," [Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg] said.

Facebook, the world's largest social media company, is in the middle of a reputational crisis and faces questions from lawmakers and regulatory agencies after the political research firm Cambridge Analytica collected information on as many as 87 million people without their permission. Previous estimates had put the number of users affected at 50 million.

Now the company, which has lost about $100 billion in stock value since February, is reviewing its data policies — and changing some of them — to find better methods of protecting user data.

And its leaders are apologizing.

"We know that we did not do enough to protect people's data," Sandberg said. "I'm really sorry for that. Mark [Zuckerberg] is really sorry for that, and what we're doing now is taking really firm action."

The Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree by allowing third parties to have unrestricted access to user data without users' permission and contrary to user preferences and expectations.

The penalties for violating the order would be devastating, even for Facebook. At $40,000 per violation, the total cost could theoretically run into the billions."

Facebook admits it discussed sharing user data for medical research project; The Guardian, April 5, 2018

Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian; Facebook admits it discussed sharing user data for medical research project

[Kip Currier: Timely to see this article, after discussing HIPAA and medical research data in my lecture yesterday on "Legal and Ethical Issues of Research Data Management (RDM)". And after my post here, responding to John Podhoretz's "sorry, you are a fool" New York Post opinion piece.]

"Medical institutions are held to a higher privacy standard than Facebook because of laws such as the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or Hipaa, which makes it illegal for health care providers and insurers to share patient data without their permission.

But it is not clear how the proposed research would have complied with this strict health privacy law.

Two people who heard Facebook’s pitch and one person familiar with it told CNBC that the proposed project would mesh data from health systems (such as diagnoses and prescribed medications) with data from Facebook (such as age, friends and likes). The idea would be to match what is known about a patient’s lifestyle with their medical needs to customize care."

Sorry, Facebook was never ‘free’; The New York Post, March 21, 2018

John Podhoretz, The New York Post; Sorry, Facebook was never ‘free’

[Kip Currier: On today's MSNBC Morning Joe show, The New York Post's John Podhoretz pontificated on the same provocative assertions that he wrote about in his March 21, 2018 opinion piece, excerpted below. It’s a post-Cambridge Analytica “Open Letter polemic” directed at anyone (--or using Podhoretz’s term, any fool) who signed up for Facebook “back in the day” and who may now be concerned about how free social media sites like Facebook use—as well as how Facebook et al enable third parties to “harvest”, “scrape”, and leverage—people’s personal data.

Podhoretz’s argument is flawed on so many levels it’s challenging to know where to begin. (Full disclosure: As someone working in academia in a computing and information science school, who signed up for Facebook some years ago to see what all the “fuss” was about, I’ve never used my Facebook account because of ongoing privacy concerns about it. Much to the chagrin of some family and friends who have exhorted me, unsuccessfully, to use it.)

Certainly, there is some level of “ownership” that each of us needs to take when we sign up for a social media site or app by clicking on the Terms and Conditions and/or End User License Agreement (EULA). But it’s also common knowledge now (ridiculed by self-aware super-speed-talking advertisers in TV and radio ads!) that these agreements are written in legalese that don’t fully convey the scope and potential scope of the ramifications of these agreements’ terms and conditions. (Aside: For a clever satirical take on the purposeful impenetrability and abstruseness of these lawyer-crafted agreements, see R. Sikoryak’s 2017 graphic novel Terms and Conditions, which visually lampoons an Apple iTunes user contract.)

Over the course of decades, for example, in the wake of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and other medical research abuses and controversies, medical research practitioners were legally coerced to come to terms with the fact that laws, ethics, and policies about “informed consent” needed to evolve to better inform and protect “human subjects” (translation: you and me).

A similar argument can be made regarding Facebook and its social media kin: namely, that tech companies and app developers need to voluntarily adopt (or be required to adopt) HIPAA-esque protections and promote more “informed” consumer awareness.

We also need more computer science ethics training and education for undergraduates, as well as more widespread digital citizenship education in K-12 settings, to ensure a level playing field of digital life awareness. (Hint, hint, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos or First Lady Melania Trump…here’s a mission critical for your patronage.)

Podhoretz’s simplistic Facebook user-as-deplorable-fool rant puts all of the blame on users, while negating any responsibility for bait-and-switch tech companies like Facebook and data-sticky-fingered accomplices like Cambridge Analytica. “Free” doesn’t mean tech companies and app designers should be free from enhanced and reasonable informed consent responsibilities they owe to their users. Expecting or allowing anything less would be foolish.]

"The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein said it best: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Everything has a cost. If you forgot that, or refused to see it in your relationship with Facebook, or believe any of these things, sorry, you are a fool. So the politicians and pundits who are working to soak your outrage for their own ideological purposes are gulling you. But of course you knew.

You just didn’t care . . . until you cared. Until, that is, you decided this was a convenient way of explaining away the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

You’re so invested in the idea that Trump stole the election, you are willing to believe anything other than that your candidate lost because she made a lousy argument and ran a lousy campaign and didn’t know how to run a race that would put her over the top in the Electoral College — which is how you prevail in a presidential election and has been for 220-plus years.

The rage and anger against Facebook over the past week provide just the latest examples of the self-infantilization and flight from responsibility on the part of the American people and the refusal of Trump haters and American liberals to accept the results of 2016.

Honestly, it’s time to stop being fools and start owning up to our role in all this."

A woman says an Ancestry.com DNA test revealed her father — her parents’ fertility doctor; The Washington Post, April 3, 2018

Lindsey Bever, The Washington Post; A woman says an Ancestry.com DNA test revealed her father — her parents’ fertility doctor

[Kip Currier: I've been lecturing on some of the upshots and the downsides of DNA testing the past few years in my Information Ethics course and for guest talks in a colleague's Research Data Management (RDM) course. Advertising for DNA testing has exploded this past year on television and radio. These ads, in my view, are very irresponsible in presenting DNA tests as utterly carefree and adventurous (connect with your ancestral homelands! find out the history of your long-lost ancestors!), without adequately alerting people to the very significant, potentially harmful aspects they can present.

This article is one cautionary tale about unexpected consequences of DNA tests.]

"After news of the lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com said in a statement Tuesday that DNA testing “helps people make new and powerful discoveries about their family history and identity.

“We are committed to delivering the most accurate results, however with this, people may learn of unexpected connections,” it read. “With Ancestry, customers maintain ownership and control over their DNA data. Anyone who takes a test can change their DNA matching settings at any time, meaning that if they opt out, their profile and relationship will not be visible to other customers.”

Since the situation came to light, Rowlette and her parents have been “suffering immeasurably,” the lawsuit says."

Why Scott Pruitt’s living arrangement raises ethics concerns; PBS News Hour, April 3, 2018

PBS News Hour; Why Scott Pruitt’s living arrangement raises ethics concerns

"The controversies and ethical questions surrounding EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt are piling up. Most recently, ABC News reported that Pruitt was occasionally renting a room in Washington from the wife of a lobbyist for the energy industry. William Brangham learns more from Eric Lipton from The New York Times and Kathleen Clark from The University of Washington St. Louis School of Law."

Facebook Privacy Scandal Unleashes Nationwide ‘Litigation Swarm'; Bloomberg, April 4, 2018

Christie Smythe, Bloomberg; Facebook Privacy Scandal Unleashes Nationwide ‘Litigation Swarm'

"Litigation Swarm

"Facebook’s having to fight on multiple fronts, with potentially conflicting strategies and obligations, is what will make this ‘litigation swarm’ problematic," said Marc Melzer, a New York-based attorney. The company will likely "want to move slowly and withhold as much as they can without antagonizing regulators or the courts that are presiding over the suits."

Users and investors have filed at least 18 lawsuits since last month’s revelations about Cambridge Analytica. Beyond privacy violations, they are accusing Facebook of user agreement breaches, negligence, consumer fraud, unfair competition, securities fraud and racketeering.

Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and board members including Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel face additional claims from shareholders for allegedly failing to uphold their fiduciary duties and wasting corporate assets."

Facebook said the personal data of most of its 2 billion users has been collected and shared with outsiders; Washington Post, April 4, 2018

Craig Timberg, Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post; Facebook said the personal data of most of its 2 billion users has been collected and shared with outsiders

"Facebook said Wednesday that most of its 2 billion users likely have had their public profiles scraped by outsiders without the users' explicit permission, dramatically raising the stakes in a privacy controversy that has dogged the company for weeks, spurred investigations in the United States and Europe, and sent the company's stock price tumbling."

The Guardian view on Grindr and data protection: don’t trade our privacy; Guardian, April 3, 2018

Editorial, Guardian; The Guardian view on Grindr and data protection: don’t trade our privacy

"Whether the users were at fault for excessive trust, or lack of imagination, or even whether they were at fault at all for submitting information that would let their potential partners make a better informed choice, as liberal ethics would demand, the next thing to scrutinise is the role of the company itself. Grindr has now said that it will no longer hand over the information, which is an admission that it was wrong to do so in the first place. It also says that the information was always anonymised, and that its policy was perfectly standard practice among digital businesses. This last is perfectly true, and perhaps the most worrying part of the whole story.

We now live in a world where the valuations of giant companies are determined by the amount of personal data they hold on third parties, who frequently have no idea how much there is, nor how revealing it is. As well as the HIV status, and last test date, Grindr collected and passed on to third parties its users’ locations, their phone identification numbers, and emails. These went to two companies that promise to make it easier to deliver personalised advertisements to phones based on the users’ locations and to increase the amount of time they spend looking at apps on their phones. The data was in theory anonymised, although repeated experiments have shown that the anonymity of personal information on the internet is pretty easily cracked in most cases."

Grindr Sets Off Privacy Firestorm After Sharing Users’ H.I.V.-Status Data; The New York Times, April 3, 2018

Natasha Singer, The New York Times; Grindr Sets Off Privacy Firestorm After Sharing Users’ H.I.V.-Status Data

"Grindr, the social network aimed at gay, bisexual and transgender men, is facing a firestorm of criticism for sharing users’ H.I.V. status, sexual tastes and other intimate personal details with outside software vendors.

The data sharing, made public by European researchers on Saturday and reported by BuzzFeed on Monday, set off an outcry from many users. By Monday night, the company said it would stop sharing H.I.V. data with outside companies."

Dan Rather Has Scathing Words For Sinclair News Anchors Reading ‘Propaganda’; HuffPost, April 2, 2018

Andy McDonald, HuffPost; Dan Rather Has Scathing Words For Sinclair News Anchors Reading ‘Propaganda’

"Renowned former CBS news anchor Dan Rather chimed in on the disturbing story that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of more than 170 U.S. TV stations, had forced its local news outlets to read the same script decrying “false news.”...

Dan Rather

✔@DanRather

News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn't journalism. It's propaganda. It's Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.

3:54 PM - Apr 2, 2018

• 215K
• 99.8K people are talking about this

John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasters ‘Like Members Of A Brainwashed Cult’; HuffPost, April 2, 2018

Rebecca Shapiro, HuffPost; John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasters ‘Like Members Of A Brainwashed Cult’

"[John Oliver] was back Sunday night with this message: 

“Nothing says ‘we value independent media’ like dozens of reporters forced to repeat the same message over and over again like members of a brainwashed cult.” 

After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data; Guardian, March 31, 2018

Evgeny Morozov, Guardian; After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data

"Finally, we can use the recent data controversies to articulate a truly decentralised, emancipatory politics, whereby the institutions of the state (from the national to the municipal level) will be deployed to recognise, create, and foster the creation of social rights to data. These institutions will organise various data sets into pools with differentiated access conditions. They will also ensure that those with good ideas that have little commercial viability but promise major social impact would receive venture funding and realise those ideas on top of those data pools.

Rethinking many of the existing institutions in which citizens seem to have lost trust along such lines would go a long way towards addressing the profound sense of alienation from public and political life felt across the globe. It won’t be easy but it can still be done. This, however, might not be the case 10 or even five years from now, as the long-term political and economic costs of data extractivism come to the surface. The data wells inside ourselves, like all those other drilling sites, won’t last for ever either."

A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe; Guardian, April 3, 2018

Richard Stallman, Guardian; A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

"Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.

Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook. Deeper, meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures.

The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data."

Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan; Esquire, April 2, 2018

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire; Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan

[Kip Currier: 
During my undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, I spent my junior year in Kobe, Japan, attending a Japanese university and living with a Japanese chemistry professor emeritus and his wife. Toward the end of my year there, my Japanese skills had gotten proficient enough to have some really "meaty", impactful discussions. I've never forgotten a conversation I had with my host mother, Haruko, who shared her experiences as a 20-something housewife raising her young sons in the waning days of World War II, while her husband taught at one of the Japanese Naval Colleges on the Japan Sea.

U.S. forces were poised to land in Japan and the Japanese state media were disseminating stories about all manner of alleged atrocities the media said would occur if the Americans were to step on Japanese soil. My host mother Haruko said that because the Japanese Imperial Army controlled the media, the populace, people like her, had no access to information other than what the state media put out via radio and newspapers. As an island archipelago with no land borders with other nations, this was especially true for Japan. Years later, she said she came to understand how they had been misled by the Imperial Army's disinformation and propaganda. I never forgot how important information--access to the truth--is.

Access to information--truthful, trusted, verifiable information--is the linchpin of a free and independent press, informed citizenry, and healthy, functioning, questioning democracies. James Madison's 1822 admonition about information, cited in the excerpt below, is as timely as ever.]

"Not only is this a cautionary tale about media consolidation—Sinclair is inches away from owning stations in Chicago and Los Angeles—it’s also a cautionary tale about the imbalance between labor and management in a very visible industry. When the mash-up appeared this weekend, anonymous Sinclair employees leapt to the electric Twitter machine to talk about the read-or-die pressure on the employees in the company’s local stations. And, when this happens in the context of an administration dedicated to keeping people stupid enough to believe all its lies, you have reached a critical mass driving the country inexorably toward the result of Mr. Madison’s great warning:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”"

Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director; Huffington Post, April 2, 2018

Aaron Weiss, Huffington Post; Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director

"Only Sinclair forces those trusted local journalists to lend their credibility to shoddy reporting and commentary that, if it ran in other countries, we would rightly dismiss as state propaganda...

When Deadspin’s genius supercut of Sinclair’s latest promo went viral last weekend, my heart broke for the anchors who were used to make the equivalent of a proof-of-life hostage video. They know what they’re being conscripted to do, but most of them have no choice in the matter. They’re trapped by contracts, by family obligations and by an industry that is struggling to stay relevant in an era of changing media habits.

The anchors who were forced to decry “fake news” put their own credibility on the line, accusing “some members of the media” of pushing “their own personal bias and agenda,” when nothing could be further from the truth...

There’s nothing inherently wrong with journalism that wears its bias on its sleeve. At some point, local news may transform into something more like the cable news landscape, with hosts who are paid to share their perspective and commentary. But that requires honesty on the part of station owners, and it requires embracing a diversity of viewpoints on the air. That’s the exact opposite of what Sinclair is doing to local broadcasting today."

As Sinclair’s sound-alike anchors draw criticism for ‘fake news’ promos, Trump praises broadcaster; Washington Post, April 2, 2018

Paul Farhi, Washington Post; As Sinclair’s sound-alike anchors draw criticism for ‘fake news’ promos, Trump praises broadcaster

"Tim Burke had a simple idea: Take clips of dozens of TV news anchors all spouting the same lines and mash them up into one video. The idea, he said, was to expose how one company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, had turned its many local newscasts into a national megaphone for its corporate views.

So Burke, the video director at Deadspin, pieced together video of anchors at 45 Sinclair-owned stations across the United States, all reading from a script that the ­Maryland-based company recently distributed to its stations about the perils of “fake news” and how it is “extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

The result was a massively viral video that sparked broad mainstream media attention, incited an angry tweet from President Trump, and prompted a national conversation about the perils of enabling companies such as Sinclair to control an ever-larger number of TV stations."

News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison; New York Magazine, April 1, 2018

New York Magazine; News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison

"The anchors were forced to read the so-called journalistic responsibility messages word for word by their employer, the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of television stations in the country. The features were one of Sinclair’s now infamous “must-run” segments, consisting of conservative commentary that every Sinclair-owned station is required to air.

Think Progress rounded up many of the “fake stories” segments for a chilling video on Friday, but Deadspin’s Timothy Burke published a much more terrifying version on Saturday, which at one point shows 30 of the segments synced up in unison..."

Machine learning as a service: Can privacy be taught?; ZDnet, April 2, 2018

Robin Harris, ZDNet; Machine learning as a service: Can privacy be taught?

"Machine learning is one of the hottest disciplines in computer science today. So hot, in fact, that cloud providers are doing a good and rapidly growing business in machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS).

But these services come with a caveat: all the training data must be revealed to the service operator. Even if the service operator does not intentionally access the data, someone with nefarious motives may. Or their may be legal reasons to preserve privacy, such as with health data.

In a recent paper, Chiron: Privacy-preserving Machine Learning as a Service Tyler Hunt, of the University of Texas, and others, presents a system that preserves privacy while enabling the use of cloud MLaaS."

Can Europe Lead on Privacy?; The New York Times, April 1, 2018

Tom Wheeler, The New York Times; Can Europe Lead on Privacy?

"The United States government has a lot of explaining to do. Why is it that American internet companies such as Facebook and Google are required to provide privacy protections when doing business with European consumers but are free to not provide such protections for Americans? Why is it that Americans’ best privacy hope is the secondary effect of interconnected networks rather than privacy protections designed for Americans? Why shouldn’t Americans also be given meaningful tools to protect their privacy?"

Why privacy is an alien concept in Chinese culture; South China Morning Post, April 2, 2018

Luisa Tam, South China Morning Post; Why privacy is an alien concept in Chinese culture

"Views on privacy differ wildly between Chinese and Western cultures. People in the West place considerable emphasis on privacy and often go to great lengths to defend it because they cherish and respect individualism. But when you talk about privacy to Chinese, a common reaction you get is: “What privacy?”"

Add Data Privacy to List of Brexit Bumps for EU, UK; Bloomberg, April 2, 2018

Giles Turner, Bloomberg; Add Data Privacy to List of Brexit Bumps for EU, UK

"The smooth transfer of personal data between the European Union and the U.K. — from bank details to your Uber bill — is vital for almost every British business. The U.K. is intent on maintaining that relationship following Brexit. The EU isn’t making any promises."

Facebook Is Not the Problem. Lax Privacy Rules Are.; The New York Times, April 1, 2018

The Editorial Board, The New York Times; Facebook Is Not the Problem. Lax Privacy Rules Are.

"Many businesses will struggle to comply with the European Union’s new rules, and officials in member countries will have a hard time enforcing it consistently. “We will have a learning curve,” said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads France’s privacy regulator, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés. “We will have to adjust.”

But it is increasingly clear that businesses will figure out how to live with and make money under tougher privacy rules. Some companies are also planning to apply some or all of the data protection requirements to all of their customers, not just Europeans. And other countries have or are considering adopting similar rules. Throughout history, meatpackers, credit card companies, automakers and other businesses resisted regulations, arguing they would be ruined by them. Yet, regulations have actually benefited many industries by boosting demand for products that consumers know meet certain standards.

Facebook and other internet companies fear privacy regulations, but they ought not to. Strong rules could be good for them as well as for consumers."

Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us; Quartz, April 1, 2018

Michael J. Coren, Quartz; Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us

"Firmly in Zuckerberg’s camp are Google co-founder Larry Page, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, and computer scientist Andrew Ng, a prominent figure in the artificial intelligence community who previously ran the artificial intelligence unit for the Chinese company Baidu. All three seem to share the philosophy that technological progress is almost always positive, on balance, and that hindering that progress is not just bad business, but morally wrong because it deprives society of those benefits.

Musk, alongside others such as Bill Gates, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, and venture investors such as Sam Altman and Fred Wilson, do not see all technological progress as an absolute good. For this reason, they’re open to regulation...

Yonatan Zunger, a former security and privacy engineer at Google has compared software engineers’ power to that of “kids in a toy shop full of loaded AK-47’s.” It’s becoming increasingly clear how dangerous it is to consider safety and ethics elective, rather than foundational, to software design. “Computer science is a field which hasn’t yet encountered consequences,” he writes."

THE TRICKY ETHICS OF THE NFL'S NEW OPEN DATA POLICY; Wired, March 29, 2018

Ian McMahan, Wired; THE TRICKY ETHICS OF THE NFL'S NEW OPEN DATA POLICY

"SINCE 2015, EVERY player in the National Football Leaguehas been part cyborg. Well, kind of: Embedded in their shoulder pads is an RFID chip that can measure speed, distance traveled, acceleration, and deceleration. Those chips broadcast movement information, accurate to within six inches, to electronic receivers in every stadium. Even the balls carry chips.

So far, that data has stayed within the walls of each individual team, helping players and coaches understand offensive and defensive patterns. But this week, the NFL’s competition committee made good on its intention to share data on all 22 players after every game—with all the teams.

That move will give competitors a greater understanding of player movement across the league. But it could also begin to change the essence of the game. Much of the challenge of sports is the ability to quickly process and react to information, an instinctual gift of great coaches and players. By stripping away some of the uncertainty of competition, data will shift who holds that analytical advantage—and introduce some new ethical questions."