https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300 File this one under “don’t be evil”. Of course what is also interesting is that there is actual pushback from the employees, within an industry that has sometimes been called a “morality free zone”. ... (more)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ File this one under “you do it to yourself” Of course the key thing here is that directly selling this data to law enforcement is illegal, but indirectly selling it is not. The market is acting as an evolutionary force to find ways to extract money by moving around laws that are out in place to protect citizens. In this case the economy can move at a faster pace with business innovation that the law can to protect citizens. ... (more)

The Verge also covered this well: www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17334658/google-ai-phone-call-assistant-duplex-ethical-social-implications and they have a quote from Joanna Bryson, who talked at SAGE just before Christmas. Her quote is finished out with the following. There are no obvious answers to these questions, but as Bryson points out, Google is at least doing the world a service by bringing attention to this technology. It’s not the only company developing these services, and it certainly won’t be the only one to use them. ... (more)

Last week I was at the FORCE2015 conference. I enjoyed it greatly. This was the 2015 instance of the FORCE11/Beyond the pdf conference. I’d been aware of these meetings since the first one was announced back in 2011, but this was my first chance to attend one. (If I recall, I’d even been invited to the DagStuhl workshop, but had been unable to attend. I’d been to one DagStuhl workshop on science and social networks many years ago, and that had been one of the best short meetings that I’d ever attended, so I’d been sad not to be able to go to the Beyond the PDF meeting). ... (more)