Without teeth, the ACM Code of Ethics is just a bunch of lofty-sounding words on a website.
In this situation, ethics is management's job, and value-creation and loss-avoidance (with appropriate documentation to list-out during pay-review) are our jobs. Sum ergo mihi prosum.
Which is why I am surprised seeing this come from Google. Everyone has already admitted they are fine sending all of their data to them which benefits them greatly.
I think this may be a Xerox Alto, IBM PC, or Sun Java moment. In the short term I can see a clear benefit to Google for this. They want to get machine-learning into more aspects of the Android mobile experience, Android customers are justifiably paranoid of sending things like every keystroke on the device back to Google's cloud, and so this gives them a privacy-acceptable way to deliver the features that will make them more competitive in a new market. Remember that the vast majority of Google employees honestly want to do what's best for the user, not what preserves Google's monopoly.
The vast majority of people in any organisation are good people who want what's best in the sense of the greater good - that does not prevent organisations from doing bad things.
>> The vast majority of people in any organisation are good people who want what's best in the sense of the greater good
No. The vast majority of people in any organisation are timid folks who want what's best in the sense of the greater good, unless the greater good involves any courage on their part. These people are congenial, but don't confuse those with good people.
I don't hold the leadership at Google with the same contempt as I hold the leadership at say Verizon, GE, Ford, or News Corp (WSJ). I'm sure given enough time all corporations are categorically evil but Google isn't there yet.
Google's internal training emphasizes to do the right thing and compete fairly%, going so far as to not use terms in PR or even internal email such as 'crush the competition' 'dominate' 'destroy', and always doing what's good for the user, rather than bad for the competition.
There's nothing altruistic about that. Emails with those words will cause problems for the legal department when they come up in discovery during antitrust litigation.
Google forcing their employees to go through training to avoid bribery, sexual harassment, and antitrust problems for the company is not due to anything other than saving the company money. To be pedantic, the disagreement with GGP is not whether the actions are altruistic but whether the actions were done out of altruism.
It's easy being altruistic when you're the clear leader and have a comfortable margin. Doesn't give me any comfort knowing how benevolent Google is presently.
True, but there are some kinds of data that people are still uncomfortable sending to Google. Medical data is considered especially private, and aggregation of medical data is a huge obstacle to improving treatment using ML. I think this could be really huge in that space.
There is a movement to change consent forms (which patients sign as they enter a medical system) to permit larger sharing of medical data outside of its direct use. IE, you are offered an opt-in to permit your data to be analyzed beyond an individual visit, possibly for medical issues completely unrelated to any immediate medical problem. The consent forms are transparent, and opt-in- the health consumer is informed what their data will be used for, and they explicitly have to say it's OK (blanket consent, can be revoked).
I think this is a win, because the consumer has the choice, and if enough people do it ,the resulting aggregated datasets will have exceptional power to help solve global medical problems.
Did that update solve any problems? Other than perhaps for someone who didn't like accessing advanced properties like object metadata? Or maybe people just really wanted a too dark blue color scheme? I switched back to the old after giving it a try and getting frustrated; wasn't ready for prime time.
