Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race
|| Diversity Equity and Inclusion || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads.
Ethics and Computing Repository
Please note that content may be behind a paywall, or have a limited number of free articles.
A computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions was labelled biased against blacks. It's actually not that clear
|| Algorithmic Bias || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
OMPAS, is used nationwide to decide whether defendants awaiting trial are too dangerous to be released on bail. In May, the investigative news organization ProPublica claimed that COMPAS is biased against black defendants.
Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails for U.S. Intelligence - Sources
|| Internet/Privacy || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.
Just & Unjust Targeted Killing & Drone Warfare
|| Robotics Applications || Journal || Short (5 min or less)
What It’s Like to Be a Black Woman in Tech: A Q&A with Kaya Thomas
|| Diversity Equity and Inclusion || Blog Post || Short (5 min or less)
In this Q&A with former Facebook employee Kaya Thomas, she discusses what it’s been like to work as a Black woman in tech in her internships and what top companies should be doing to attract minority candidates like her.
98 Personal Data Points that Facebook uses to Target Ads to You
|| Internet/Privacy || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
A list of some (but not all) of the data points Facebook uses to target ads for users, which begs to question of if the tracking and bundling of information that Facebook does is really benevolent or not.
Disputed territories: where Google Maps draws the line
|| Misinformation || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Outrage followed the (misleading) news that Google had removed label for Palestine from its map service – but borders are rarely as simple as cartographers might like.
Sites Spying on You in Weird New Ways, Princeton Study Exposes
|| Internet/Privacy || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
A Princeton study analyzed of one million websites, and reveals the newest breed of site snoopers are tracking everything from battery level to your fonts, and it doesn't need cookies to do so.
Your Favorite Website Might Be Discriminating Against You
|| Algorithmic Bias || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Studies have shown that people are being treated differently online based on their race, actual or perceived. Websites have been found to use demographic data to raise or lower prices, show different advertisements, or steer people to different content.
Should Your Driverless Car Hit a Pedestrian to Save Your Life?
|| Transportation Applications || Media Article Video || Medium (5-10 min)
The United States military is trying to come to terms with the fact that advanced technology is on the cusp of making it possible for machines like armed drones to make killing decisions.
Machine Bias
|| Algorithmic Bias || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.
Can the presence of a robot affect whether humans behave ethically?
|| Robotics Applications || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
A series of studies at Cornell investigate how humans behave in the company of robots. The article highlights its findings.
Are Robots Job Creators?
|| Future of Work || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Two schools of economic thinking have been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: Will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans?
Revealed: how facial recognition has invaded shops – and your privacy
|| Facial Recognition || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Retailers and hotels are increasingly using facial recognition technology to track your face in order to minimise losses and increase sales, give VIPs preferred treatment and more, giving rise to privacy concerns.
Apple’s Engineers, if Defiant, Would be in Sync With Ethics Code
|| Professional Ethics || Media Article || Medium (5-10 min)
If Apple's employees refused to help the F.B.I. access the contents of an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, their decision would be supported by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Americans Feel the Tensions between Privacy and Security Concerns
|| Internet/Privacy || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
Women are better at coding than men—if they hide their gender
|| Diversity Equity and Inclusion || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
A group of computer science students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and North Carolina State University examined how gender impacts the acceptance of contributions on the open source code repository site GitHub.
Report: Robots, other advances will cost humans 5.1 million jobs by 2020
|| Future of Work || Media Article || Short (5 min or less)
The World Economic Forum warned in a report that advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and other modern technologies are currently likely to lead to a net loss of 5.1 million jobs worldwide by the year 2020.
Can an Algorithm Hire Better Than a Human?
|| Algorithmic Bias || Media Article || Medium (5-10 min)
Start-ups say that they can eliminate biases and create more skilled and diverse workplaces, but data science will probably still need human supervision.