Year: 2018

Whether it’s surveilling or deceiving users, mishandling or selling their data, or engendering unhealthy habits or thoughts, tech these days is not short on unethical behavior. But it isn’t enough to just say “that’s creepy.” Fortunately, a course at the University of Washington is equipping its students with the philosophical insights to better identify — and fix — tech’s pernicious lack of ethics.

“Designing for Evil” just concluded its first quarter at UW’s Information School, where prospective creators of apps and services like those we all rely on daily learn the tools of the trade. But thanks to Alexis Hiniker, who teaches the class, they are also learning the critical skill of inquiring into the moral and ethical implications of those apps and services.

What, for example, is a good way of going about making a dating app that is inclusive and promotes healthy relationships? How can an AI imitating a human avoid unnecessary deception? How can something as invasive as China’s proposed citizen scoring system be made as user-friendly as it is possible to be?

I talked to all the student teams at a poster session held on UW’s campus, and also chatted with Hiniker, who designed the course and seemed pleased at how it turned out.

The premise is that the students are given a crash course in ethical philosophy that acquaints them with influential ideas, such as utilitarianism and deontology.

“It’s designed to be as accessible to lay people as possible,” Hiniker told me. “These aren’t philosophy students — this is a design class. But I wanted to see what I could get away with.”

The primary text is Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel’s popular book Justice, which Hiniker felt combined the various philosophies into a readable, integrated format. After ingesting this, the students grouped up and picked an app or technology that they would evaluate using the principles described, and then prescribe ethical remedies.

As it turned out, finding ethical problems in tech was the easy part — and fixes for them ranged from the trivial to the impossible. Their insights were interesting, but I got the feeling from many of them that there was a sort of disappointment at the fact that so much of what tech offers, or how it offers it, is inescapably and fundamentally unethical.

I found the students fell into one of three categories.

Not fundamentally unethical (but could use an ethical tune-up)

WebMD is of course a very useful site, but it was plain to the students that it lacked inclusivity: its symptom checker is stacked against non-English-speakers and those who might not know the names of symptoms. The team suggested a more visual symptom reporter, with a basic body map and non-written symptom and pain indicators.

Hello Barbie, the doll that chats back to kids, is certainly a minefield of potential legal and ethical violations, but there’s no reason it can’t be done right. With parental consent and careful engineering it will be in line with privacy laws, but the team said that it still failed some tests of keeping the dialogue with kids healthy and parents informed. The scripts for interaction, they said, should be public — which is obvious in retrospect — and audio should be analyzed on device rather than in the cloud. Lastly, a set of warning words or phrases indicating unhealthy behaviors could warn parents of things like self-harm while keeping the rest of the conversation secret.

WeChat Discover allows users to find others around them and see recent photos they’ve taken — it’s opt-in, which is good, but it can be filtered by gender, promoting a hookup culture that the team said is frowned on in China. It also obscures many user controls behind multiple layers of menus, which may cause people to share location when they don’t intend to. Some basic UI fixes were proposed by the students, and a few ideas on how to combat the possibility of unwanted advances from strangers.

Netflix isn’t evil, but its tendency to promote binge-watching has robbed its users of many an hour. This team felt that some basic user-set limits like two episodes per day, or delaying the next episode by a certain amount of time, could interrupt the habit and encourage people to take back control of their time.

Fundamentally unethical (fixes are still worth making)

FakeApp is a way to face-swap in video, producing convincing fakes in which a politician or friend appears to be saying something they didn’t. It’s fundamentally deceptive, of course, in a broad sense, but really only if the clips are passed on as genuine. Watermarks visible and invisible, as well as controlled cropping of source videos, were this team’s suggestion, though ultimately the technology won’t yield to these voluntary mitigations. So really, an informed populace is the only answer. Good luck with that!

China’s “social credit” system is not actually, the students argued, absolutely unethical — that judgment involves a certain amount of cultural bias. But I’m comfortable putting it here because of the massive ethical questions it has sidestepped and dismissed on the road to deployment. Their highly practical suggestions, however, were focused on making the system more accountable and transparent. Contest reports of behavior, see what types of things have contributed to your own score, see how it has changed over time, and so on.

Tinder’s unethical nature, according to the team, was based on the fact that it was ostensibly about forming human connections but is very plainly designed to be a meat market. Forcing people to think of themselves as physical objects first and foremost in pursuit of romance is not healthy, they argued, and causes people to devalue themselves. As a countermeasure, they suggested having responses to questions or prompts be the first thing you see about a person. You’d have to swipe based on that before seeing any pictures. I suggested having some deal-breaker questions you’d have to agree on, as well. It’s not a bad idea, though open to gaming (like the rest of online dating).

Fundamentally unethical (fixes are essentially impossible)

The League, on the other hand, was a dating app that proved intractable to ethical guidelines. Not only was it a meat market, but it was a meat market where people paid to be among the self-selected “elite” and could filter by ethnicity and other troubling categories. Their suggestions of removing the fee and these filters, among other things, essentially destroyed the product. Unfortunately, The League is an unethical product for unethical people. No amount of tweaking will change that.

Duplex was taken on by a smart team that nevertheless clearly only started their project after Google I/O. Unfortunately, they found that the fundamental deception intrinsic in an AI posing as a human is ethically impermissible. It could, of course, identify itself — but that would spoil the entire value proposition. But they also asked a question I didn’t think to ask myself in my own coverage: why isn’t this AI exhausting all other options before calling a human? It could visit the site, send a text, use other apps and so on. AIs in general should default to interacting with websites and apps first, then to other AIs, then and only then to people — at which time it should say it’s an AI.

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To me the most valuable part of all these inquiries was learning what hopefully becomes a habit: to look at the fundamental ethical soundness of a business or technology and be able to articulate it.

That may be the difference in a meeting between being able to say something vague and easily blown off, like “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and describing a specific harm and reason why that harm is important — and perhaps how it can be avoided.

As for Hiniker, she has some ideas for improving the course should it be approved for a repeat next year. A broader set of texts, for one: “More diverse writers, more diverse voices,” she said. And ideally it could even be expanded to a multi-quarter course so that the students get more than a light dusting of ethics.

With any luck the kids in this course (and any in the future) will be able to help make those choices, leading to fewer Leagues and Duplexes and more COPPA-compliant smart toys and dating apps that don’t sabotage self-esteem.

They say you can’t predict the weather. Acquisitions are often the same way. If you had told me yesterday, for instance, that adorable weather app Poncho was about to be acquired and effectively shuttered by a direct-to-consumer beverage company, I’d have told you that’s about as plausible as a cat who’s also a meteorologist.

And yet, here we are. Dirty Lemon, a high-end drink maker that sells products through text message for ~$10 a pop, has purchased the beloved app. The company confirmed the acquisition in a press release that contains the following buzzwordy quote from CEO Zak Normandin: “This partnership advances our vision to build a frictionless conversational platform by expanding our technological capabilities as an organization.”

Well, yeah, obviously.

Poncho was a bit more straightforward in describing what all of this means for the fate of the app. “It means no more weather…forecasts,” reads the note on the company’s front page. “Obvi there will still be weather, duh lol. And I hope you think of me every time you look at it, unless it’s nasty weather in which case pls think of a competitor weather service instead.”

As far as what this means for Poncho itself, the company’s CEO Sam Mandel will be serving as an adviser for Dirty Lemon, and the rest of the team will be folded into its parent company. The employees will work to help improve the drink company’s SMS-based sales model.

Mandel tells Fast Company that the service ultimately wasn’t able to monetize its product, in spite of raising $2 million courtesy of an appearance on Planet of the Apps last year. “We weren’t able to achieve critical mass,” he says. “It’s been a challenge […] to build a product that was independently compelling.”

The same, apparently, can’t be said for Dirty Lemon’s pricey beverage business.

By 2020, Brazilian mobile giant, Movile, wants to improve the lives of more than one billion people through its apps. The company began its mission in 1998 selling gaming, news and SMS messaging services to mobile operators in Brazil. After receiving its first investment from South African-based global investor Naspers 10 years ago, Movile grew into one of the largest and most successful mobile companies in Latin America, with more than 150 million monthly active users of its apps and estimated revenues over $240 million.

Microsoft’s HoloLens has an impressive ability to quickly sense its surroundings, but limiting it to displaying emails or game characters on them would show a lack of creativity. New research shows that it works quite well as a visual prosthesis for the vision impaired, not relaying actual visual data but guiding them in real time with audio cues and instructions.

The researchers, from Caltech and University of Southern California, first argue that restoring vision is at present simply not a realistic goal, but that replacing the perception portion of vision isn’t necessary to replicate the practical portion. After all, if you can tell where a chair is, you don’t need to see it to avoid it, right?

Crunching visual data and producing a map of high-level features like walls, obstacles and doors is one of the core capabilities of the HoloLens, so the team decided to let it do its thing and recreate the environment for the user from these extracted features.

They designed the system around sound, naturally. Every major object and feature can tell the user where it is, either via voice or sound. Walls, for instance, hiss (presumably a white noise, not a snake hiss) as the user approaches them. And the user can scan the scene, with objects announcing themselves from left to right from the direction in which they are located. A single object can be selected and will repeat its callout to help the user find it.

That’s all well for stationary tasks like finding your cane or the couch in a friend’s house. But the system also works in motion.

The team recruited seven blind people to test it out. They were given a brief intro but no training, and then asked to accomplish a variety of tasks. The users could reliably locate and point to objects from audio cues, and were able to find a chair in a room in a fraction of the time they normally would, and avoid obstacles easily as well.

Then they were tasked with navigating from the entrance of a building to a room on the second floor by following the headset’s instructions. A “virtual guide” repeatedly says “follow me” from an apparent distance of a few feet ahead, while also warning when stairs were coming, where handrails were and when the user had gone off course.

All seven users got to their destinations on the first try, and much more quickly than if they had had to proceed normally with no navigation. One subject, the paper notes, said “That was fun! When can I get one?”

Microsoft actually looked into something like this years ago, but the hardware just wasn’t there — HoloLens changes that. Even though it is clearly intended for use by sighted people, its capabilities naturally fill the requirements for a visual prosthesis like the one described here.

Interestingly, the researchers point out that this type of system was also predicted more than 30 years ago, long before they were even close to possible:

“I strongly believe that we should take a more sophisticated approach, utilizing the power of artificial intelligence for processing large amounts of detailed visual information in order to substitute for the missing functions of the eye and much of the visual pre-processing performed by the brain,” wrote the clearly far-sighted C.C. Collins way back in 1985.

The potential for a system like this is huge, but this is just a prototype. As systems like HoloLens get lighter and more powerful, they’ll go from lab-bound oddities to everyday items — one can imagine the front desk at a hotel or mall stocking a few to give to vision-impaired folks who need to find their room or a certain store.

“By this point we expect that the reader already has proposals in mind for enhancing the cognitive prosthesis,” they write. “A hardware/software platform is now available to rapidly implement those ideas and test them with human subjects. We hope that this will inspire developments to enhance perception for both blind and sighted people, using augmented auditory reality to communicate things that we cannot see.”

They first launched nearly a decade ago with names like Diamond Foundry, Brilliant Earth, Mia Donna and Pure Grown Diamonds, with millions of dollars in financing and a mission to reshape the diamond industry. They were startups that were going to popularize man-made diamonds for the masses in a way that would make the industry more sustainable and wring billions of dollars from the roughly $100 billion diamond market.

Now, it looks like they’re going to be quarrying up the industry’s remains thanks to news that the De Beers Group, one of the giants of the jewelry and mining industry, is going to start selling its own brand of jewelry crowned by lab-grown diamonds. Called Lightbox Jewelry, the new brand will launch in September. The idea is to sell the jewelry at a lower price point to consumers who want diamonds but don’t want to have to pay luxury prices for them.

Diamonds will retail from $200 for a quarter-carat stone up to $800 for a one-carat stone and will be available in different hues from pink, blue and white diamonds in earring and necklace designs.

It’s sure to be a blow for lab-grown manufacturers like Diamond Foundry, which raised $100 million from high-profile investors like Mark and Alison Pincus; serial entrepreneur Ev Williams; early Facebook COO Owen Van Natta; and actor Leonardo DiCaprio — who played a mercenary gem smuggler in the 2006 film “Blood Diamond.”

For De Beers, today’s announcement of a new jewelry line was a very public reversal from a company that two years earlier had turned up its nose at the thought of man-made jewelry providing a competitive offering to existing products.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has sent subpoenas to Uber and Lyft that asks them to provide information pertaining to how each company classifies its drivers (W2 employees versus 1099 contractors), as well as pay and benefits.

The subpoenas also request a list of drivers who have either started or ended at least one ride in SF between 2015 to the present day and proof that any driver classified as an independent contractor meets the three criteria set forward by a recent California Supreme Court ruling. According to the April 30 ruling, companies must classify workers as employees unless they can prove the person is not under the control of the company, works outside the company’s general scope of business and has an independent business or job of the same nature of the work they do for the company.

It’s worth noting that both Uber and Lyft generally describe their drivers as people who do this type of work as a side hustle, rather than as people who operate their own transportation companies.

“The argument that these companies have tried to use in the past — that they’re just a technology platform — doesn’t pass the smell test,” Herrera said in a press release “People go to Microsoft or Salesforce for software. People go to Uber or Lyft for a ride.”

With the subpoenas, Herrera wants to ensure Uber and Lyft are legally classifying their drivers as independent contractors. If not, then Uber and Lyft must offer drives minimum wage, sick leave, health care and paid parental leave.

“San Francisco’s laws help ensure that employers provide a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” Herrera said. “Our laws also guarantee employees basic humane benefits like sick leave, health care, and paid parental leave. We are not going to turn a blind eye if companies in San Francisco deny workers their pay and benefits. We are not going to tolerate any company shirking its responsibility to pay for benefits and shifting that burden onto taxpayers when drivers without health insurance turn to the emergency room. If your company is valued at $62 billion, you can afford to give your workers health care.”

I’ve reached out to Uber and Lyft and will update this story if I hear back.

On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and eBay CEO Devin Wenig asking their companies to help remove the listings for fake pay TV boxes from their respective websites. These boxes often falsely bear the FCC logo, the letter informed, and are used to perpetuate “intellectual property theft and consumer fraud.”

With the rise in cord cutting, a number of consumers have found it’s just as easy to use a software app like Kodi on a cheap streaming media device to gain access to content – like TV shows and movies – that they would otherwise miss out on by dropping their pay TV subscription. As an added perk, various software add-ons enable consumers to stream movies still in the theaters, too. It’s an easier way to access pirated content than visiting The Pirate Bay and downloading torrent files.

While Kodi’s open source software itself doesn’t facilitate piracy, through a number of downloadable add-ons, it’s relatively easy for consumers to figure out how stream pirated content thanks to online tutorials and YouTube videos.

It’s not clear if people know that they’re doing something illegal, or just don’t care because there are seemingly no repercussions related to their behavior.

Amazon, Netflix and major Hollywood studios have gone after these box makers through the court system already. In January, for example, a U.S. District Court judge handed down a preliminary injunction against TickBox TV, a Georgia-based set-top box maker that was profiting from the sale of its so-called “Kodi boxes.”

Amazon and eBay also proactively remove devices facilitating piracy from their websites, the FCC acknowledged in its letter.

Amazon, for example, prevented the sale of “tens of thousands of unlawful devices” through its “automated proactive detection, preventative investigations, and notices of infringement from rights holders,” the letter stated. Ebay, meanwhile, also removes devices reported as infringing and removes those that say things like “never pay another cable bill” or “fully loaded” in their descriptions.

But the FCC wants the companies to do more, and faster,  it seems.

“Unfortunately, despite your good work in this area, devices continue to make it to consumers through your website,” writes FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. “Many of these devices contain harmful malware that will most certainly be passed on to the consumer. Moreover, the consumer may unwittingly believe that the device is lawful since they were able to purchase it from a legitimate company.”

The FCC is additionally concerned because many devices use the FCC logo to aid in their attempt to defraud consumers.

It notes that nine set-top box distributors were referred to the FCC in October for streaming pirated content, and seven of those displayed the FCC logo even though there was no record of their compliance with the commission’s requirements.

The letter specifically asks both Amazon and eBay to step up their enforcement, by “swiftly removing” devices the FCC alerts them to; it also asks the companies to provide the FCC with information about the manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers, when requested.

The move not only pushes Amazon and eBay to more quickly and thoroughly cooperate with the FCC, it also serves as a warning about the U.S. Government’s plan to further its crackdown on these fake pay TV boxes.

Of course, there’s a bit of irony here regarding Amazon’s participation in this fight – its Amazon Fire TV Stick, or “firestick” as consumers tend to refer to it, is one of the most popular devices out there today for enabling piracy.

People either buy the “firestick” themselves and install Kodi and various add-ons or they buy a slightly more expensive, hacked firestick from a local reseller who’s hawking them on under-the-radar backchannels, like Facebook Groups or online message boards. The hacked firestick is set up with Kodi pre-installed and the various add-ons for free streaming already configured. (A search for “kodi box” on Amazon.com also returns the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV as the top two results thanks to ‘sponsored’ placements by Amazon. Hmmm.)

The U.S. is not alone in its Kodi box crackdown. Recently, business owners in Wales who sold fully-loaded Kodi boxes were sentenced to prison, for example, and its courts have ruled Kodi boxes illegal before. Canada has gone after websites that enable piracy through Kodi, as well.

In response to the letter, eBay says it plans to cooperate with the FCC:

“We’re committed to working in collaboration with the FCC to prevent the sale of these illegal products. As outlined in the letter, eBay utilizes a variety of measures to prevent these products from being sold on our platform. These include proactive filtering and manual site reviews to identify illegal products, as well as taking action on direct referrals received from the FCC. We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with the FCC to keep these illegal products off our site.”

Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Amazon has shared its statement, which was written in its own letter to the FCC.

(h/t: FireceCable) 

Virgin Galactic is celebrating a successful second test flight of SpaceShipTwo, the rocket-powered passenger spacecraft that may someday take tourists to the edge of space. Today’s test took the VSS Unity, the second craft built in this class, up to 114,500 feet and Mach 1.9, or nearly 1,300 miles per hour.

Unity’s first powered flight was less than two months ago, which was itself the first powered flight Virgin Galactic had attempted since the fatal breakup of the company’s previous SpaceShipTwo-class spacecraft, Enterprise, in 2014.

Much has been redone since then but the basics of the Virgin Galactic flight style are the same. A relatively traditional jet-powered plane, a WhiteKnightTwo class plane (in this case the VMS Eve), carries the SpaceShipTwo craft (Unity) up to somewhere around 45,000 feet. There the latter detaches and fires up its rocket engine, accelerating to high speed and high altitude, after which it glides to the surface and lands more or less like any other plane.

Today’s test flight followed these parameters to the letter, though the numbers were considerably higher than April’s flight. The rockets burned for 31 seconds total, and the craft’s unique “feather” system for slowing its descent was deployed successfully.

The Unity is designed to handle nearly twice the speeds achieved today, but these tolerances must of course be approached gradually and the various systems tested under friendly conditions before moving on to hostile ones.

“It was great to see our beautiful spaceship back in the air and to share the moment with the talented team who are taking us, step by step, to space,” said Virgin founder Richard Branson in a press release. “Seeing Unity soar upwards at supersonic speeds is inspiring and absolutely breathtaking. We are getting ever closer to realizing our goals. Congratulations to the whole team!”

I’ve asked the company for a few more details on the flight, as well as when we can expect a third test.

PSA: Don’t use a popular brand name for your online accounts.

Facebook’s social media team accidentally directed users to the Messenger account of a random Facebook user this morning, instead of the new HBO Westworld Messenger account it was trying to promote. On Twitter, the Messenger account instructed followers to chat with “Tes, the host of the new @WestworldHBO experience on Messenger” and linked to the Messenger account, messenger.com/t/westworld.

One small problem: “Westworld” was a Kentucky woman named Lisa, not an account run by HBO.

The mistake was first spotted by Matt Navarra, who wondered if Lisa was about to get an inbox slammed with messages.

The tweet was up for a couple of hours before the mistake was realized.

As a result, Lisa received a small handful of messages – around 20, she says. Facebook’s messaging system filtered these as “message requests,” which is how it handles unsolicited chat requests. Fortunately, the headache was minimal for the unintended recipient as she was able to just decline the incoming requests without having to respond.

Lisa says Facebook also reached out to her to apologize, and it corrected the link.

She has a sense of humor about the whole thing, as well.

“Guess that’s what I get for calling my home Westwold lol” she texted back to us when we asked her about the situation.

Facebook confirmed the mistake, in a statement.

“For a short time this morning, a tweet from the Messenger Twitter account incorrectly linked people to message an individual person, instead of the intended bot for Messenger. As soon as we became aware of the error, we immediately corrected it. We’re very sorry for any trouble or confusion this caused,” a Facebook spokesperson responded.