Computer Ethics, Fall 2020, Thursdays

December 3

Class 14 Readings

By this point you should have read all of chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5.




A case study in phone surveillance, by Martin Gundersen. The same companies involved in the sale of the Muslim Pro data appear here:

    nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/my-phone-was-spying-on-me-so-i-tracked-down-the-surveillants


Edward Snowden interview with Glenn Greenwald on the Dangers of Silicon Valley Censorship. Snowden is talking about this from the left, rather than the right.

One thing I found interesting is that Snowden seems to think the Silicon Valley firms are influenced by the government, through "revolving door" employees who work in the Valley and then become regulators. I'm not sure I really believe this. Snowden completely ignores the possibility that sites might want to control their content to increase the engagement of their audience.


Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy: www.wired.com/story/facebook-is-going-after-its-critics-in-the-name-of-privacy.

The issue is an app that users can install that scrapes data on ads (especially political ads) they are shown.


You're not anonymous; I know your name, email and company: darrennix.com/blog/youre-not-anonymous-i-know-your-name-email-and-company.

Not a surprise, except that the post is originally from 2012 (the link here is from January 2013). Advertisers stopped sending these emails because people found them very creepy, but they still do it.





The difficulty of defeating patent infringement claims by proving an idea was obvious is one problem with software patents.

Another issue with software patents is that software innovations are often not very deep, and the cost of litigation far outweighs the societal benefits of innovation. But that is another story, and the cost of litigation would be much less if weak patents were easier to challenge.

Crime

Hacking was not always about crime.

Hacking and the CFAA

Citrin, Nosal, US v Van Buren

TJX, Target and PCI-DSS

Some felonies:

Review crime

Antitrust