Technology's Constant Ethical Morass

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Technology Thursday

Two stories raising interesting, but different, sets of ethical questions arose in the tech world this past week.

In the first, we learn that once again, the Apple hype machine reigns supreme. An Apple employee lost a prototype of the new iPhone. Someone found it, then sold it to Gizmodo, who wrote up a long piece about it, providing a good sense of what new features are likely in the 4G iPhone. As you can imagine, many heads in the tech blogosphere exploded over this. I maintain that any other company's prototype phone would never have generated this much attention. Especially since none of the features that Gizmodo describes are really all that surprising. But because Apple's hype machine can manage to turn even the simplest incremental changes into "Big News!", people are inordinately curious about their secret prototypes. Making this story even more interesting are critiques of Gizmodo's tactics--they paid for stolen property, if you ask some--and whether what they did was journalistically ethical. So there's at least a week or two's worth of reading in the tech/media critic blogosphere. (For my own sake, the only person I'm really concerned about here is the poor guy who misplaced the thing. I just can't bring myself to care too much about Apple's "secrets" being revealed a bit early, nor, given my already extremely low opinion of modern journalism, bring myself to muster much outrage about what Gizmodo did.)

In other potentially ethically-challenged tech activity, Facebook has once again decided that it knows more about what you want to reveal than you do, by turning information public that you used to be able to keep private. Here's how Facebook describes it:

Now, certain parts of your profile, including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests, will contain "connections." Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.

And they go on to imply that there are all sorts of opt-out options, but I read stuff like this a fair amount and have always found FB's explanations of what they are or are not doing completely confusing. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's take on it:

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.

In this case, as is almost always the case, I think Facebook is in the wrong. But they are wrong about so many things -- from information policy and privacy policy on their site to matters of user interface design. Unfortunately, they have cornered the market on easy ways to connect with far-flung family and lost long high school classmates you'd completely forgotten about. So there we all are.

So what do you think? Should Gizmodo have bought the phone and published the information? Should Facebook stop messing around with its "privacy" policies and clarify what it will and won't do with the information you put on its site? And how much of a pain is it that we, the users of these technologies, have to think about the implications of the ethical choices companies make? (Some day maybe I'll do a ranty post about Apple's ridiculous App Store control freakery.)

Comments

[Katherine]

It is *so* frustrating that as users, we have zero choice about these sweeping changes made by companies that we've grown to trust and rely upon. What happened to "listening to the customer" and engaging with their audience? I can only hope that eventually, companies realize that if they make too many moves in the wrong direction, they will stretch and eventually break that trust. There are many bold faced names who made that mistake and are now in history's dust-bin.

As for the iPhone hubbub, here's a conspiracy theory for you: what if Apple misplaced the phone on purpose, to build buzz for the next release?