Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right
30 Nov 2017
Introduction
Oh, ethics. No matter where you go, ethics will always be a controversial topic. In fact, the more places you go to, the more controversial it gets. What’s morally correct to one person might be wrong to someone in another country, and even less than that, moral issues differ greatly between people of just different ethnic backgrounds or religions. Luckily, I’m going to talk about ethics in the context of software engineering, so that should make things quite simpler. As a software engineer, there are a surprisingly large number of things to think about in regards to ethics. To give a brief runover of them, I’ll say that as a software engineer, one should be a generally moral person by doing things such as being honest, trying to positively contribute to society and avoid harming others, but should also do their best to stay true to their contractual and managerial imperatives. Of course, there are other, more minute details such as being true to oneself, trying to create the best product possible, and being supportive and fair to one’s colleagues, but I think that this basic picture of ethics is a sufficient start.
Ever heard of StreetView?
In this essay, I chose to evaluate a case study on privacy, in which the main offender is Google’s StreetView feature. As most of us know, Google’s StreetView feature is a feature that allows one to view almost any location on the planet from both aerial and street levels. The issue here is that this data is readily available, and during the collection of this data, images of many individuals and their homes were unknowingly, and in many cases, unwantedly, were captured. Burglars could use pictures of houses to plan robberies, and pictures of sensitive locations such as adult stores and abuse centers also depicted customers walking to and from the stores. Although Google provided a way to report and get rid of such images as a sort of solution, this required that the depicted person in question first be aware of the fact that the image existed.
But wait, there's more!
But that’s not all. A few years later, it was discovered that the vehicles that drove around to take these very images had been collecting personal data from surrounding unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Among this data were SSIDs, device identifiers, medical and financial records, passwords, and email content. Google tried to blame this on a single “rogue engineer,” but it was later found that he had properly communicated with his superiors regarding the data collection. In association with these actions, Google was determined to have broken numerous laws and eventually settled a lawsuit brought by 38 states for a mere seven million dollars, and promised to set up an annual privacy week for its employees, which included privacy-related training and education.