This year I was able to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for the second time. As only a casual programmer, I am an odd attendee, but the event supports a cause I care deeply about: getting and retaining more women in technology and engineering roles. GHC is an exhilarating mixture of famous keynote speakers, girl power workshops, tech demonstrations, and a “swag” filled career fair. On Day 1 I was definitely into it:

https://twitter.com/Misclanius/status/654294038439292929

But this year, unlike last year, the shiny newness of GHC had worn off a bit, and I started to notice a few things that bothered me. As a mainstream conference, GHC is made palatable to the widest possible audience of women, men, and businesses (because in America, they count as people too!). Being palatable means the conference doesn’t critically engage with many important issues and is therefore open to a variety of critiques. For one, its feminism is of the Lean In^© variety, so it doesn’t really engage with the intersection of race, class, and gender [PDF] in tech companies. GHC also supports an, at times, obscene and gratuitous display of wealth, with “The Big Three” of Silicon Valley (Google, Facebook, and Apple) competing to outspend each other putting on the biggest recruitment show. Maybe I have the start of a series of posts on my hands…

Today, however, I want to talk about ethics. That is, I want to talk about how we talk about ethics at tech conferences. First: Yes, we should be talking about ethical issues at technology conferences. As Cyborgology’s writers have explored numerous times [1] [2] [3] [4], technology has politics and therefore we need to talk about ethics—a system which guides actors in right and wrong conduct—to improve the outcomes of technological innovation. So why not have that conversation in the belly of the beast, at a tech conference—a space that is designed to showcase new developments and recruit new workers.

https://twitter.com/Misclanius/status/654307489307979776

How do we actually have a conversation about ethics? Before answering, let me share the ways the conversation is currently going at GHC:

1. Speakers ignore ethics or politics completely.

I would share examples of speakers ignoring ethics and politics completely, but there are word limits to these essays.

2. Speakers joke about ethics, then bracket that conversation for another time or place.

On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Danelle Shah from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory gave a talk on “Follow, #Hashtag and @Mention: Mining Social Media for Disaster Response.” To begin her presentation, Dr. Shah joked that there are serious implications for her research, but she wouldn’t “touch the policy and ethical implications with a 10 foot pole”. As her audience of several hundred women laughed, the pit of my stomach fell. Essentially, Dr. Shah is taking social media data in cases where the user chose to use an alias and/or chose not to disclose their geographic location, and then her team is running an algorithm that infers the user’s identity and the geographic location of their home “with 80% accuracy within 10 meters”. Let me repeat that: Users have intentionally chosen to not use their IRL names or provide their geolocation to Twitter, and this team has created a tool that generates that information despite a clearly stated preference by the individual. The user has no control over their information. But, as Dr. Shah explained, the tool is created for disaster response; Previously, “we hoped that enough people have GPS and tagging on to be able to see a signal”, but now a much larger section of the data is useful, so “we can rescue people at their home.” I left the session wanting to discuss: Should there be a right, when actively choosing not to share information, to not have that information inferred by others? Should there be an individual right to control the actions taken on your personal data?

The presentation, despite claiming to bracket the ethics and politics for another time and place, has implicit references to ethical and political issues throughout. For one, this research is funded by the Department of Defense through a DARPA grant, and military funding is highly political. Dr. Shah’s conclusion also makes a claim for consequentialist ethics, that “the ends justify the means”, a hotly debated system for determining right from wrong action. Yet, by joking about ethics at the start of the presentation, Dr. Shah has primed the audience to ignore and accept these positions without question. In short, there is no such thing as having the conversation about ethics and politics at another time and place because ethics and politics are always present.

3. Speakers agree to have the conversation, but it starts from scratch and with no forethought.

On Wednesday, I was very excited to attend a Birds of a Feather session on Ethics and Morality in Virtual and Augmented Reality led by Katherine Harris and Olivia Erickson, two “Developer Evangelists of Microsoft”. Because it was a BoF session, Harris and Erickson’s roles were “to open up the discussion of what sort of ethical and moral questions will need to be discussed as virtual and augmented reality enters the consumer arena at a large scale.” While there were several interesting points raised by audience members, the vast majority of responses suffered from two problems. First, many answers were without historical knowledge of the contested nature of current regulatory structures. These answers presumed that if an action is currently legal, it is necessarily an ethical action. The second major limitation was that many participants had simply never thought about it before, so they were visibly and verbally forming opinions on the spot. “Well”, “I guess”, “Maybe”, “Hmmm”, etc. These two combine to create a dangerous tabula rasa approach to ethical issues where existing practices get recreated in perpetuity without critical reflection. Ethics are an area for rigorous inquiry that must incorporate historical knowledge and debate.

So, how should we talk about ethics at a tech conference?

I have a few ideas for how we might actually have a conversation about ethics, but it falls on two different groups to make these critical conversations happen. For one, there is too much “siloing” between fields of specialization in academia and the private sector. Ethicists and humanists need to attend these professional and public meetings to facilitate and support conversations about ethics and technological innovation.

For those individuals who are already attending tech conferences, they need to be aware of ethical issues, talk about them, and recognize that ethics don’t just emerge, perfectly formed from a single individual’s sense of right and wrong. Ethical systems are historically situated and should be debated by the community.

If you are interested in discussing these issues, I serve as a co-chair of the Ethics and Social Aspects of Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance, formed in late 2014. We started with the basics, like when, where, and who should be talking about ethics around data and data sharing (Everyone!), and we are now working on a community built, annotated bibliography of previous work and resources on the ethics of data. These topics and issues are also covered by danah boyd’s research institute Data & Society. The NSF’s Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society is also building an expanded network of individuals interested in the ethical and social issues that emerge from a changing data landscape.

Candice Lanius is a PhD Student in the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who still gets annoyed every time she hears someone say “The data speaks for itself!” (A statement which should technically be “The data speak for themselves”, but my advisor isn’t reading this, so I can use the colloquial version if I want to!)