Computer Ethics Paper 2
Due: Monday, April 3, 2017
Topic option 1: FaceBook Regulation
(Ok, not just Facebook, but that title looks better than, say,
"Regulation")
Should FaceBook, and other large online services with intrusive
information-collection practices, be subject to some form of governmental
regulation? Should they be pressured to regulate internally? Most proposals
call for privacy-related regulation, though there are also many calls for
these large online firms to provide some sort of helpdesk to assist people
wrongly locked out.
Some people believe FaceBook should be more responsible for filtering out
false stories, though falsity is to some degree in the eye of the beholder.
FaceBook is quite aggressive in using its information about its users to
make them spend more time on FaceBook. Here's an excerpt from http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-free-society/,
Take a hypothetical Facebook user, Jimmy.
Jimmy tends to scroll Facebook on his phone for 5 minutes, then close the
app. Facebook knows that Jimmy likes posts from his friend Steve, because
he tends to leave positive comments on them. Next time Jimmy reaches the
5-minute mark, Facebook shows him a post from Steve. Jimmy leaves a
comment, scrolls for a bit longer, then quits the app at the 8-minute
mark. Facebook also knows that Jimmy is crushing on Jenny – he tends to
linger whenever she shows up on his Instagram feed, even if he doesn’t
like or comment. Next time Jimmy’s at the 8-minute mark, Facebook shows
him a post from Jenny. This pattern continues, and Jimmy’s Facebook use
grows from 5 minutes a day to 15.
Of course, Jimmy himself is happy. Facebook takes care of that!
Some more concrete proposals have included:
- Companies should let you see the information they have gathered about
you (Google already does this)
- Companies should notify users if there has been any breach of the
users' data. California requires this, but there is no federal law.
- Companies should write their policies not in terms of what data they
collect, but in terms of reasonably educated guesses of what someone can
find out about you by using that data. (For example, it's often easy to
guess someone's password-reset questions based on information on their
FaceBook page; this happened to Sarah Palin in 2008.)
- Companies should state specifically what information they
collect and how they use it. FaceBook, for example, collects location
information; what do they do with it? How long do they retain it?
FaceBook also collects many images that they use for facial recognition;
in what contexts do they identify your likeness to others? Just to your
Friends?
- Facebook should create some sort of system for vetting the accuracy of
news stories that appear in feeds (perhaps through an editorial office,
perhaps through a user-based voting system)
Facebook and others are all private companies, but there is ample
precedent for enacting basic regulations.
Another issue many people talk about is that if someone's account is
blocked, they often have no recourse. Even Paypal, which handles actual
money for users, provides no easy way to reach them. The usual argument is
that large Internet sites have taken on the character of a public utility.
Sandra Nyaira, a journalist in Zimbabwe, had her FaceBook account closed in
2016 due to a misunderstanding; it took eight months and widespread coverage
on Hacker News before FaceBook
reached out to Nyairi and reinstated her. Nyairi had tried to contact
FaceBook from the beginning, but got nowhere. (http://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049699/update-on-the-journalist-kicked-off-facebook)
Traditional regulations -- mandatory rules -- sometimes add unnecessary
costs to a business, and make it harder to be flexible when future
competitive challenges arise. However, a regulatory framework can be made
"optional" in the sense that the safe-harbor protections of §230 and the
DMCA are optional: if sites follow some basic rules, they have immunity, or
some other legal protection. In that sense, Topic 1 is about a setting in
which businesses do not currently have a safe-harbor law
while Topic 2, below, is about a setting with an existing
safe-harbor law.
Topic option 2: Defamation Policy
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has made it nearly impossible
to take down user-posted content. This, along with the DMCA, has enabled the
rise of third-party-content sites. Some of these are mainstream, such as
YouTube and Wikipedia. Some, like Reddit, are known for the freedom provided
for users to say what they want. And some, like The Dirty, are simply in the
business of encouraging salacious gossip.
The original goal of §230, however, was to protect sites that did
family-friendly editing. Has §230 gone too far? If not, try to identify the
important principles behind §230 and defend them. If so, outline some sort
of alternative, and explain whether your alternative should be based on
regulation -- and if so how this would be implemented -- or on voluntary
website cooperation. As an example of the latter, note how Google has
limited visibility of user posts on YouTube, and made it harder to post
anonymously.
Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Compuserve escaped liability because they did no editing
of user-posted content. Should this position continue to receive the highest
protection, or should some limited editing of user-posted
content be considered the norm?
Should new §230 rules require some element of family-friendly editing, or
editing to attain some other socially appropriate goal? If a site engages in
some form of editing of user-posted content, under what circumstances should
the site escape liability?
Should sites that "encourage" inappropriate posts, by explicit and
intentional policy, be held responsible?
Should there be a take-down requirement for disparaging posts? If so, how
would you protect sites from celebrities or politicians who wanted nothing
negative about them to appear on the Internet?
Your paper (either topic) will be graded primarily on organization (that is,
how you lay out your sequence of paragraphs), focus (that is, whether you
stick to the topic), and the nature and completeness of your arguments.
It is, as usual, essential that
all material from other sources be enclosed in quotation marks (or set off
as a block quote), and preferably with a citation to the original source as
well.
Expected length: 3-5 pages (1000+ words)