Ongoing Investigations

Tag: Carleton Digital Ethics

  • Ethics Week 6: The Road So Far

    It’s midterms, and you know what that means. Time to review!

    … my work so far this term, that is. I’ve already taken my exams.

    I did a little inventory of my past blog posts, as well as some behind-the-scenes stuff, so today I’m going to be talking about what I said I’d do versus what I actually did, and whether there’s room to pick back up.

    What I Planned

    It’s actually pretty easy to see what I meant to do this term, because I wrote a blog post about it. It sums up a couple of the themes I was hoping to touch on and a couple of projects I was hoping to do.

    The executive summary of it all is thus. I had four major projects:

    1. look into different ways of organizing work, especially digital vs. analog systems
    2. study open source software communities for the Digital Scholarship Interns’ winter project
    3. investigate data security laws and how they affect college software
    4. develop my Ruby coding skills

    Did I do these things? Sort of!

    What I Did

    It’s a little hard to look back through my work the past couple weeks, because some of my blog posts are password-locked and I don’t write about everything I work on (it’s important to have focused, informative posts).

    That said, I have followed through on these plans in different ways throughout the term so far.

    First: Organizing Systems

    This is very solidly a behind-the-scenes thing. I’ve experimented a little with Google Keep, comparing it to my past experience with to-do lists in the Notes app and Wunderlist, plus bullet journals. No conclusive results yet, but this investigation is ongoing. Expect a recommendation report sometime in the future!

    Second: the Digital Scholarship Interns project

    My part of the project has been reshaped a couple times to better fit with what we’re doing. Our project is a revamp of the DSI blog (you may have noticed it’s a little snazzier than it used to be). But, since we’re focusing on blogging at Carleton, open source software didn’t really fit.

    Instead, I’m going to be doing an investigation of Carleton social media culture, comparing the Carleton Livejournal community (still up online, though not very active these days) to Facebook and how people at Carleton use it. This way, we can get a good idea of the common questions Carleton users ask, and what they look for in a platform.

    Third: Investigate Data Security Laws

    This has been a way bigger part of my term than previously anticipated. When I wrote my initial blog post, setting out my goals for the term, I thought digital systems of organization and the intern project would be my two major priorities, with some legalese on the side and a little Ruby to fill in the cracks.

    In reality, my term has focused a lot on rights management and data security. Week three had me looking into some new data privacy laws in the United States (this post was password locked, for internal use only); week four saw me thinking about what it means to safely store your work with different digital entities; and week five was all about reflecting on technology in the Iowa caucuses.

    And it’s going to keep going from there! The more digging around I do, the more stuff I find. Next week looks like it’ll see me looking through the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy of some scholastic software companies, to think about what control we have over our work at Carleton. Can’t wait!

    Of course, since I’ve been spending a lot more time than expected on this, that means…

    Fourth: Ruby Coding

    My Ruby plan for the term has shifted a bit, from coding up projects to investigating its uses. Ruby’s been used in some interesting archival projects, and one of my goals is to understand its affordances in that area.

    That said, because it has less practical ramifications in the here-and-now than understanding how we organize our work, investigating Carleton’s social media footprint, or unpacking the new laws around data privacy, this project’s been temporarily shelved.

    And frankly, I’m okay with that. One of the important lessons this term has been solid prioritizing.

    Where To Next?

    Honestly, keeping up what I’ve been doing. There are next steps for everything: writing up the different organization systems, putting together my content for the intern project, and decoding the mysteries of Terms of Service.

    I also have some new projects coming down the pipeline! They’re a secret for now, but might make an appearance in future blog posts.

  • Ethics Week 5: Let’s Talk About Iowa

    My post this week was going to be about how people use libraries and the information they contain.

    Then Iowa happened.

    So this week, we’re summarizing the technological debacle that was Monday’s Iowa caucus. What happened? Did anyone expect it? How did this come about?

    A quick overview

    In brief: in the Iowa caucus, people go to their precinct and vote for the candidate they want. The precinct then reports the totals in, so they can be counted up and people can figure out who got the most votes. In the past, the totals have been reported over the phone lines, but this year, the Iowa Democratic Party decided to commission a phone app from the tech company Shadow, Inc. to report the results. The Nevada Democratic Party also helped pay for the app’s development, hoping to use it for their upcoming caucus on February 22nd (this plan has since been scrapped).

    Some important things to note, first and foremost: this project was commissioned by the Iowa Democratic Party, not the Democratic National Committee; the app was for reporting caucus results, not for voting electronically; and, while there were security concerns, the primary issues were with the app’s performance.

    The app, whose name I can’t find (various sources call it ‘the Shadow app’, ‘the app’, or ‘the app from Shadow, Inc.’), was still in development this past weekend — meaning, days before the primary. In the tech world, this might not be too unusual: it’s pretty standard for games and apps to release patches in the early days after their release date. But for voting technology, that’s not an acceptable practice.

    So what’s the problem?

    Security was the obvious concern with the app, and has been since at least mid-January, when NPR put out a piece on the app’s development. It’s hard to get a general impression of the app’s security features, because the chairman of the Iowa State Party, Troy Price, declined to give any details on tests it might have undergone, companies that might have checked it, or issues they might have found. His goal was to avoid leaking information that might entice hackers, but many cybersecurity experts say that “security through obscurity” isn’t actually an effective countermeasure against hacking.

    That said, while the app’s poor performance definitely raised security concerns (it was meant to be used on the personal devices of the volunteers running the caucus), the main issue was just that: poor performance. The app was apparently hard to find, difficult to download, and glitchy.

    While the Iowa Democratic Party claimed it would have backup procedures in place, they weren’t prepared for the volume of failures. When caucus organizers gave up on the app and decided to report results the old-fashioned way, over the phone lines, the sheer volume of calls blocked most people from getting through, which contributed to the delay in results.

    So what now?

    Well, Nevada’s not going to be using the app. Iowa’s results have been checked against a paper trail, which was pretty foreseeable given the scrutiny this incident has caused.

    There are some upsides: Iowa was considering implementing smartphone voting for this caucus, but nixed that idea a while ago. The question of election security is also front and central, and hopefully people will be more cautious of tech’s place in the democratic process going forward.

    Also, just in case you were worried about what this incident means for the company behind the app, Shadow, Inc. released a tweet stating that they “regret the delay… and the uncertainty it caused” and that “[they] will apply the lessons learned in the future”.

    And as always, XKCD has a comic for this.

    Sources

    “Iowa’s caucus app was a disaster waiting to happen”, Zach Whittaker, TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-disaster/

    “Despite Election Security Fears, Iowa Caucuses Will Use New Smartphone App”, Kate Payne and Miles Parks, NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/795906732/despite-election-security-fears-iowa-caucuses-will-use-new-smartphone-app

    “The Shoestring App Developer Behind the Iowa Caucus Debacle”, Emily Glazer, Deepa Seetharaman, and Alexa Corse, The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shoestring-app-developer-behind-the-iowa-caucus-debacle-11580904037

    “What We Know About The App That Delayed Iowa’s Caucus Results”, Avie Schneider, NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802583844/what-we-know-about-the-app-that-delayed-iowas-caucus-results

    Shadow, Inc.’s Twitter Statement: https://twitter.com/ShadowIncHQ/status/1224773796307050497

    “Voting Software”, Randall Munroe, XKCD. https://xkcd.com/2030/

  • Ethics Week 4: It’s 2020. Where is Your Work?

    This week, I’ve been reading up on archival and maintenance systems, with a special eye to digital scholarship. How do we store and maintain things? How are systems designed to facilitate their own updates, and to keep their contents both safe and accessible?

    What I’m talking about has a couple of different aspects attached to it, since there are a lot of different factors in data storage. Here are some quick questions to ask when it comes to archiving your work:

    • Who is the entity organizing this storage?
      Different entities store different data for different reasons and in different ways. Consider: Google Books, the Gould Library, JSTOR, the Internet Archives 
    • What types of information are being stored?
      Consider file formats, storage limits, and what types of information the storing body might prioritize (and why). 
    • When was this system created, and how is it being maintained?
      Digital systems require maintenance, just like physical ones. Old websites are hard to navigate; outdated software can cause security issues. 
    • Where is your information stored, and where is it accessible?
      Is your paper being paywalled? Can the people who need to find it, find it? And conversely, is the storing entity capable of secure storage? 
    • Why is this entity storing your information?
      Have they expressed a commitment to the long-term accessibility of knowledge? Do they have a profit motive (and, if they lose profits, will that commitment waver)? 
    • How is this entity demonstrating their commitment to preserving information?
      Are they transparent with their motives, their methods, and their means? Are they likely to waver in difficult times?

    No system is perfect, but looking to an entity’s motives and methods can be particularly illuminating. Also worth investigating is how comparable companies that have shut down dealt with their records, whether they kept them after closing down, and whether those items are still accessible by their creators, or by the general public.

    Vine, for example, hosted short videos which could be made through its phone app, but went defunct after struggling to find a way to consistently monetize its content. The site still has videos available to view and to download, but people can no longer post new videos, and I couldn’t find a source on whether creators can remove their old videos or control who can see them.

    Moving forward, I’ll continue looking into how digital systems are maintained and what they might store; this will also tie into a side project I’m working on, where I will be researching the history of the internet.

  • Ethics Week 3: What’s the CCPA?

    This week I’ve been following up on looking into the CCPA, or California Consumer Privacy Act. Quick intro: the CCPA is a law that came into effect in California on January 1st, 2020, which addresses data security with regards to companies that collect and sell user data. There is a cheatsheet provided by the California government which summarizes the law, available at the end of this post.

    Essentially, what it boils down to is pretty similar to the GDPR, the European Union’s data privacy regulation which took effect in May of 2018. California consumers have the right to know what data is being collected, the right to have that data removed from records, the right to know what sorts of companies are buying their information, the right to tell people not to sell their data, and the right to not be retaliated against for exercising any other rights granted by the CCPA.

    The laws also only apply to certain businesses (specifically, ones that meet certain thresholds for revenue or user traffic), and they only apply to the sale of data. That’s caused some concern, since companies like Google and Facebook technically don’t sell their users’ data: they sell access to their users, based on the data they have on file.

    The laws also only apply to for-profit businesses, which means that non-profits which operate in California and might otherwise meet the CCPA’s criteria are not subject to those regulations; however, if they do business with for-profit institutions that involves user data, they may still have to comply with the CCPA.

    While I looked into the CCPA’s effect on for-profit institutions that work with higher education, such as ProQuest and Elseviere, I couldn’t find an official statement from those companies. I did, however, find a cybersecurity law report published by Elseviere. This report mostly touches on those facts already stated earlier, but also makes a point of emphasizing that the CCPA has defined ‘personal information’ in a much broader way than the GDPR, or any other current privacy regulation.

    Going forward, it’s not clear what the ramifications of the CCPA will be. Some people claim it goes too far; others are worried that restricting only the sale of personal information doesn’t go far enough, and won’t actually protect people’s privacy. California tends to be a trendsetter where state legislature is concerned, however, so I’ll be looking into other potential privacy bills and seeing where we’ll be going from here.

    References:

  • Ethics Week 2: Laying the Groundwork

    This being the second in a series of weekly blog posts, intended to edify the public on the various goings-on within the ethical strata of the Digital Scholarship community of Carleton, particularly with regards to…

    I kid, I kid. Here’s a quick catch-up on what I’ve been doing this week!

    The process of my work has been primarily logistical, getting up and running for the rest of term. I’ve been exploring various topics, deciding which ones are worth pursuing, and solidifying them into project ideas and questions to answer. I’ve determined four projects/areas of research, two major and two supporting, which I’ve outlined below and which feed into each other in various ways.

    After some exploration, my common question for this term will be regarding the tradeoffs between organizational affordances in the cloud, and data security. This will consist of testing various organizational systems, seeing what conveniences they offer and what drawbacks, and researching how this data is stored and what it might be used for. I will also be keeping an eye on project logistics and multi-person information/storage systems, because my major project will center around open source software.

    The Digital Scholarship Interns’ winter 2019 project will consist of revamping our website and, in the process, exploring the history of collaboration, accessibility and performance in web design. Part of my job will be examining open source communities and how they work with each other, as well as how that workflow affects the final product of their projects and designs.

    In addition, I will be following up on my earlier data security question by looking at some common sites used by colleges for logistical purposes, investigating their practices, and researching the laws being passed about data security which affect those sites. Some of the writeups on these topics may not be made public, but rest assured, I’m looking!

    And finally, I will also be engaging in a side project of mine, which is to develop my coding skills, particularly in the programming language Ruby. I’m hoping to learn more about Ruby on Rails, and possibly use it in order to build a web-based presentation of my research for the DSI project.

    Happy Week 2!

  • UXPA 2019 Reflections

    The theme for UXPA 2019 was, as far as I could tell, empathy. Empathy, caring and careful design, came up in as a refrain frequently, and when it wasn’t mentioned outright, it was implicit. This focus on thoughtfulness extended both within and without, which I found very interesting. I would expect a conference for UX Design to be, necessarily, concerned with the experience of others; I anticipated less the theme of kindness to oneself.

    SPEAKER SUMMARIES

    Keynote speaker Vivianne Castillo gave a talk titled “The Siren Call of Self-Neglect”, where she talked about the potential for burnout, and the necessity of self-care. While traffic meant we arrived partway through, I did manage to note down her focus on communication. She made two key points. Firstly, managers should make it clear that team members can be vulnerable with them, encouraging communication not just when things are going well but also when things are going poorly. Support systems can’t be built after they’re needed. Secondly, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel on discussions of ethics and other relevant fields. Those working in UX should explore other disciplines and talk to people working in those areas. Castillo also shared a Google Drive folder full of resources on self care and mindfulness, as well as some resources for white people who wish to educate themselves on racial privilege without burdening people of color. This folder is available in the supplemental materials below.

    Abby Bajuniemi’s talk, “I don’t talk like that! Research Methods and Ethics for Natural Language Interaction”, was less an exploration of digital design and more an examination of experimental ethics and how we communicate. The speaker touched on the fact that language, despite being an arbitrary social construct, is still a factor in discrimination and can be used to uphold ideologies of race, gender, and other identities. She then went on to discuss the ethics of experimental design, particularly in conveying information about the experiment to the participants and in eliciting usable data without infringing on the subjects’ privacy rights. While Bajuniemi did not have strict recommendations regarding these ethical questions, she was firm in her policies: make it clear to participants what is being collected, how it will be stored, and how it can be accessed/who will have access. She suggested hiring an interpreter or translator if there is doubt that the participants will understand the experimenter fully. Her appearance on a linguistics podcast, also mentioned in her presentation, is included in the supplemental materials.

    “Interruptions: Living in a World of Divided Attention” was the third presentation, given by Molly Hillstrom. Hillstrom outlined the cost of distractions in the workplace and in people’s personal lives, citing statistics regarding quality of work and mental health. This topic was integrated with the idea of design when Hillstrom called on designers to be careful, compassionate, and sparing in their use of notifications, to stop using features like autoplay and infinite scroll which make it easy for people to get ‘sucked in’, and to make it easy for people to adjust preferences which will help them not get distracted. There were no supplemental materials.

    Ellen Lucast presented “Opportunities and Challenges in the Voice Interaction Space”, which discussed the potential work required for true voice interaction (creating conversations, rather than programs like Alexa and Siri which have designated responses for specific statements). Much of this presentation was theoretical, and went over my head in regards to its technical aspects, but my primary takeaway was what Lucast called Grice’s Maxims, a set of rules for communication. In quick, simplified summary, they are: be truthful; give the right amount of information; be relevant; be brief and orderly. These rules were interesting to me because of the tension they suggest between usefulness and kindness. Grice’s Maxims seem, on the surface, designed to facilitate useful communication, but they also seem to allow for conversations which are trustworthy, interesting, thoughtful and intelligible. While they are good design principles for practical reasons, they also continue the theme of thinking about users as people. No supplemental materials were included in the presentation.

    McLean Donnelly’s presentation, “An Accessibility Case Study: Expedia”, outlined the initiative Donnelly took to help Expedia make its website more accessible. He gave a series of steps, which touched on initial proposals, research, an internal audit of the system, and the feedback and design cycle, among other aspects. These steps gave transparency and a good model to people who might wish to undertake similar initiatives at their own workplace. Donnelly’s work was a practical expression of the design philosophies at play throughout UXPA. He included multiple recommended resources to help practice and learn about accessible design, and recommended people draft accessibility policies for their organization as well as practicing skills-based volunteerism. His resources are listed in the supplemental materials.

    Liz Tupper’s talk, “Empowering People through Tech”, discussed human-centric/empathetic design, and a design initiative that centered the needs of the users. She emphasized the need to listen to feedback given during the testing phases, and outlined four steps for empathetic design. First, engage with people in their own space; facilitate collaborative creativity; test and get feedback from the people you seek to help; and organize a support structure for the tech and for the people the tech is supposed to exist. This talk, like Donnelly’s, gave very practical examples of design steps and brainstorming practices, but these examples were centered more around getting ideas from the users the product was intended for. Tupper did not include supplemental materials, though her design exercises may be part of a future blog post.

    Beth McKeever presented a talk called “Symbiotic Product Relationships”, which, rather than exploring empathy for the user or empathy for the self, discussed the ways in which UX designers can foster good working relationships with their coworkers, particularly their product managers. Her advice once more came down to communication. Knowing each others’ strengths and weaknesses, attending meetings together in order to facilitate detailed discussion, gaining comfort disagreeing with each other, and constructively talking about office culture were all things McKeever considered vital to a working relationship. In fact, she recommended overcommunicating when building a new relationship, in order to set up that foundation of openness. McKeever also mentioned a book on developing a culture, included in the supplemental materials.

    The closing talk was given by Jeff Sussna, titled “Beyond the Designer as Auteur”. In contrast to some prior speakers, Sussna’s consideration for the user’s experience framed the experience as an ongoing service, rather than as a one-time consumable product. The example he gave was of food: a candy bar not only fills you up and tastes nice, but it also gives you energy that you take with you throughout your day. Ultimately, Sussna stated that design was less about features and more about outcomes. He also discussed complex/emergent systems, the potential for failure, and the need to lean into chaos and learning from a) system failures and b) the creative/unintentional uses consumers find for a product. My favorite part of this presentation was a quote of Sussna’s which I found both evocative and lovely: “What problems might our solutions create?” Sussna also recommended several books, which are listed in the supplemental materials.

    PERSONAL TAKEAWAYS:

    UXPA 2019 was a challenge for me to condense down to a few words on the ethics of UX. In part this was due to the fact that each speaker’s talk touched on ethics, but some did so obliquely or veiled through a different topic. The conference was less concerned with setting out specific ethical principles or guidelines, and more concerned with exploring the ways in which we treat people with respect and dignity. At the core, this is what designing experience should be: carefully considering the feelings, needs and rights of the person whose experience is being designed. While the nature of the conference placed emphasis on interaction through questions, I am looking forward to investigating the exercises and resources recommended by presenters which merge empathy with UX design.

    SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS:

    Vivianne Castillo:

    “Vivianne’s UX Self-Care Resources”: bit.ly/uxselfcare

    Abby Bajuniemi:

    The Vocal Fries podcast, “Bilingualism isn’t Just for White Kids”: https://vocalfriespod.com/2019/04/16/episode-37-bilingualism-isnt-just-for-white-kids-shownotes/

    McLean Donnelly:

    Accessibility for Everyone, by Laura Kalbag: https://laurakalbag.com/book/

    “UX Accessibility”, by Doug Collins through Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/classes/UX-Design-For-Accessibility/166696059

    The Makery Group’s Accessibility Policy: https://www.themakerygroup.com/accessibility-policy.html

    Beth McKeever:

    The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle: http://danielcoyle.com/the-culture-code/

    Jeff Sussna:

    Design for Dasein, by Thomas Wendt: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Dasein-Understanding-Experiences/dp/1506166539/

    How Do Committees Invent?, by Melvin E. Conway: http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

    Drift Into Failure, by Sidney Dekker: https://www.amazon.com/Drift-into-Failure-Sidney-Dekker/dp/1409422216

    Designing Delivery, by Jeff Sussna: https://www.sussna-associates.com/book

  • Fall 2019: A Term of [REDACTED]

    The common theme to my work as the Ethics Intern this term has been anonymization, particularly of data. The two projects taking the bulk of my attention both deal with the requirements of ethical data collection; one in a practical manner, one in a theoretical. First is my work with the Public Memory of Myanmar project, on behalf of Professor Tun Myint; second is my research into the Institutional Review Board and its requirements for Carleton.

    The Public Memory of Myanmar project is an ongoing effort to document daily life in Burma/Myanmar, in various towns and cities around the country. The Carleton Political Science department sponsors an annual trip, organized by Tun Myint, where participants photograph and interview locals. Burma/Myanmar is a politically turbulent area, and the Public Memory exists in order to preserve ways of life that are in jeopardy and to put narratives of life into those people whose experiences may not be depicted in the official political narratives put out by the state. However, this political turbulence also means that local people participating in this project may be in danger if they can be identified. Much of my work this term has therefore consisted of going through each item in the collection (a photograph/video, accompanied by descriptive metadata) and combing through the information associated with each object in order to find any specific names or locations that could be used to identify individuals.

    This focus on the particulars of individual data also comes up in my other major project, which has been to do research with regards to the Institutional Review Board at Carleton, the standards it must meet, and the standards it must uphold. The IRB is an overseeing body at Carleton that approves project proposals for work which involves research using human subjects. These proposals must explain what data they wish to collect, how they will collect it, and what their plans are for safe storage. These concerns come up most frequently with regards to the psychology and economics departments. However, it is definitely possible for other fields to propose projects that fall under the purview of the IRB. The regulations the IRB is subject to are relevant to the library and to digital scholarship because the library is responsible for the storage of data after it is collected by student researchers (it must be kept for a minimum of three years after the study is concluded, according to federal law). Carleton is also subject to GDPR regulations where data collection overlaps with GDPR jurisdiction (data collected in regards to people currently located in the EU falls under this jurisdiction). 

    Ethical data collection under the IRB involves looking not only at which pieces of information are collected, but how these pieces might work together to identify an individual even if personal IDs are not collected. For example, while collecting college ID numbers or Social Security numbers would make participants easy to identify and therefore would not be allowable under the IRB, collecting, for example, age, gender, hometown and current dorm creates the potential to identify specific individuals by combining this information. Finding, for example, a 23-year-old woman from Albany living in a specific building is a distinct possibility based on collected data which the researcher might not even mean to use.

    You can see why it’s been difficult for me to come up with a visual to convey the work I’ve done this term, since so much of my work centered on stripping away identity. In the end, what I settled for was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Please enjoy Sanitized Data, by Pilot Irwin (2019).

  • Pilot Irwin 2020 Introduction

    Hi, my name is Pilot Irwin, and I’m a senior CAMS major from New York City. In addition to my work in Cinema and Media Studies, I also have a strong interest in Computer Science and Economics, and I’m fascinated by the ways STEM disciplines and the humanities can not only intersect but inspire each other. As the Ethics intern, I will be responsible for examining how we interact with digital technology and how the construction of digital systems affects people’s lives, both intentionally and accidentally (2019-2020).

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