Reading 07: Advertising

The troubling thing about advertising is that for the companies that pay to advertise their products to the consumer (you), it is in their interest to know as much as they can about you and your buying habits.  This allows them to carefully pick and choose which products they show to you in order to increase the likelihood of you purchasing one of their products.  As far as business strategy goes, this one makes a lot of sense.  You wouldn’t advertise literature on classical music to a teenager who has a propensity to buy comic books, cause odds are that teenager would just ignore it and the money paid to advertise to that individual would have been ineffective.  Logically, companies would want to store a certain amount of information on their customers in order to better market their products and improve sales.  The problem is what is too much information.

In the article here, we see an example of how the retail chain Target was able to,”figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know.”  In this article, we see an example of how Facebook was able to piece together an individual was gay before they had even come to that conclusion, let alone come out to anyone.  Here is another example of Facebook users that were outed as gay to advertisers, whether they were publicly out about their sexuality or not.

The troubling part is that these examples show how there is information that can be gathered and extrapolated about us without our knowledge or consent, and used to market to us.  This monitoring and aggregation of data is done for the sake of our convenience in some scenarios, but if it didn’t help to improve the sales and profitability of a company, would they still do it? Odds are no, they wouldn’t.  Recall the meme that states “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”  This is especially true these days with all the free services like Amazon, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and more that we use on a daily basis.  These companies all collect our information and are able to sell it for profit, and so that the buyer can use that information as they wish.  This seems like a very indiscriminate system that cuts the user (who is effectively the commodity being sold) out of the process completely.  They have no representation or protection in this system, nor can they effectively limit what information can be used or gathered without completely abstaining from the use of most many products and websites.  It has become harder to use the internet without giving away most of your information than ever before, so much so that the only way to win in this scenario is to not play the game and just remain offline.  Unfortunately, that is almost out of the question in this day and age where technology rule our daily lives.

Personally, I have an incredibly low tolerance for advertising on the internet, and I am a prolific user of Adblock and other tools.  I do it for my own convenience (fuck Youtube and their impossible to skip ads) as well as because I do not wish to reward the use of my own information to manipulate me into purchasing things I don’t need.  For this reason, I also do my best to block or limit the usage of cookies or storage of information by websites and third parties on my computer as much as possible.  I believe that the use of these tools is ethical, as I should be able to choose what I see on a given website.  I don’t go on reddit or Facebook or Youtube to see ads, and I don’t approve of the method in which they are marketed to me with my own information.  Hopefully, this practice sends a message that will one day reach the ears of someone with enough influence over the process to promote some sort of meaningful change.

Reading 06: Government Backdoors and You

Technology companies are neither legally nor ethically obliged to implement backdoors in their products for the government or government agencies for the sake of government surveillance or other motives.  Regardless of the reason behind why the government desires these backdoors, citizens of this country have a right to privacy of communication and personal conduct as long as it is within the bounds of the law. As this article here states, “We must ensure both the fundamental right of people to engage in private communications as well as the protection of the public. One of the bedrock principles upon which we rely to guide us is the principle of judicial authorization: that if an independent judge finds reason to believe that certain private communications contain evidence of a crime, then the government can conduct a limited search for that evidence.” This is just one example of the ways in which our government is designed to protect its people from unfair abuse of political power.  Without some form of due process, nothing stands in the way of preventing excessive abuse of government tools to spy on the general public in the name of national security.

Companies (such as Apple) are ethically responsible for protecting the privacy of their users.  Apple, in their recent letter to their customers, expanded on their beliefs that backdoors to encryption and security and privacy are not in the best interest of the consumer, and that they would not assist in developing such tools.  Furthermore, if Apple created such a backdoor, there is next to nothing that would be able to prevent its abuse by third parties such as competition in the marketplace or by hackers seeking to exploit these security flaws.  In protecting privacy, Apple is not inherently enabling violent or harmful activities.  In fact, they are totally compliant with the FBI’s lawful requests and court orders.  In today’s world, companies such as Apple service the masses in their endeavors to shelter the people’s right to privacy rather than the ability of a few to perpetrate acts of terror or harm on the rest of the population.  Furthermore, without lawful order, Apple or any other software company cannot be compelled to create backdoors or hand over user information anyways, and to do so could severely damage their user base and hold serious repercussions for the company.

It is hard to justify allowing room for people who mean harm to others, but the protection of the rights of many are too important to sacrifice.  The “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” is a weak argument for the removal of personal liberties.  Just because you are not partaking in anything that is explicitly illegal, it does not mean you are totally willing to let the government or anyone else search through your private life and information to confirm it.  It is the burden of the government or the accuser to provide some evidence of illegal activity or otherwise before any form of search or violation of privacy can be used to confirm or dispel whether the individual has committed any crime.  Forgoing these rights in the name of safety is a slippery slope, and sacrifices too much of the individual’s personal liberty.  Additionally, only law abiding citizens would be the ones affected by this surveillance.  Should they choose to do so, the miscreants and evildoers will always find a way to work around the system, and possibly even exploit the surveillance and back doors to their own ends.

Project 2: Individual Response

From my experience, the most important parts of our guide would be the parts detailing when to start searching. My largest mistake was waiting too long to start looking for an internship.  Fortunately it worked out for me, I got a good internship doing undergraduate research and I learned my lesson, but I felt very limited and stressed out by the situation I had put myself in.  It’s pretty hard to balance school while also searching for employment or internship opportunities, and wasting half of my time didn’t do me any favors.

I wished I had been given some more instruction and help with learning how to interview well, and how to best structure my resume, appearance, and demeanor to appeal to employers.  I was aware of, but did not utilize some of the resources at the career center that I believe could have helped me immensely.  The one thing I had on my side was I knew to research the company beforehand to at least get an idea of how their interview process would work.  I wish I had also been able to go through some mock interviews to get an idea of how to better prepare myself.  It’s hard to overcome someone’s first impression from that interview, so I felt especially pressured to try and be perfect every time I sat down for an interview.

The best advice I received was to have a plan beyond just the job for which you are interviewing.  When someone asks you, “where do you want to be in 5-10 years?”, you should always have a sufficient answer up your sleeve, but you should also keep in mind how the current job you are interviewing for will help you get there. If your answer makes the interviewer scratch their head and wonder, “why is he/she trying to work here? And why should I hire them?”, then it is not a good answer.  Having a plan is the best advice I received.

My opinion is that college should be a place of learning and that it should remain so.  Notre Dame offers resources to help students prepare for interviews at the career center and elsewhere.  I feel that our current curriculum does prepare us for interviews in the technical sense and that the other resources available to Notre Dame students in regards to interview preparation and resume building.  As it stands, we receive a complete education at Notre Dame, but I fear that if the focus shifts to just getting students hired we will not receive the same quality of education.  Rather than rounding students out to develop a breadth of knowledge in students, the concentration would shift to just checking a few specific boxes that employers want to have in their employees.  I believe that proper resources aimed at helping students prepare for interviews and working in the real world should exist for everyone, but the focus of school should not shift from developing knowledge and well rounded individuals.  I see no significant cause for shifting the focus of a college education from educating students.  I think there is more that can be done for students in the way of getting them solid experience and concrete resume building opportunities, but the focus should not shift.

 

 

Project 2: How to get a job out of Notre Dame

 

For our project, we decided to address how to get a job out of Notre Dame. Here is our pdf containing our guide on how to best get a job or internship for Notre Dame Student!

Project2

Reading 05: Engineering Disasters

The Therac-25 incident, as described here, was an incident that resulted in six patients being exposed to huge amounts of radiation that killed four of them and left the remaining two with “lifelong injuries.”  The machine was designed to administer radiation therapy to cancer patients in the hope of killing off the cancerous cells and curing the patient.  According to the same article, the investigation determined that the cause of the malfunction was due to two key factors.  First that the machine’s software, ” contained bugs which proved to be fatal.” Second, that the machine, “relied on the controlling computer alone for safety.”  Further reading indicated that the reason these design flaws existed was that the manufacturer wanted to reduce the amount of manual preparation required in order to make the use of the machine simpler and faster for the hospital technicians operating it.

Due to the way the computer would set up the machine to function, it was possible to administer radiation without intending to if setup was performed too fast by the operator. Because testing had been done slowly and methodically, this bug was not encountered during pre-production testing.  Additionally, previous models of the machine had hardware implementations in the form of safety fuses that would prevent this error from occurring.  According to the article and the results of the investigation, “safety-critical loads were placed upon a computer system that was not designed to control them. Timing analysis wasn’t performed. Unit testing never happened. Fault trees for both hardware and software were not created.” It was the responsibility of the software engineers as well as the system engineers to catch these bugs.

It would appear that the root causes of these accidents were poor design implementation on top of inadequate testing and analysis of the system.

Software developers working on safety-critical systems face challenges in that they need to conform their designs to handle situations or time constraints that cannot necessarily be serviced by typical computer functionality with ease.  When additional cost or design constraints are placed on the system, the task can become even more difficult for the software engineers responsible.

Software engineers should always approach these types of systems with the care and knowledge of what they are doing.  The actions and work of these software engineers actions always carry consequences, but even more so when working on safety-critical systems.  Failure to perform one’s job to their highest ability could result in the loss of life or at the very least some serious harm to others.  The stakes have been raised in these scenarios, and the people responsible should be fully aware of what is at stake.

I also believe that software engineers should be held liable for their actions.  That being said, serious and thorough investigations should be performed to determine the extent of their responsibility in the incident.  For example, an incident caused by pure negligence or insufficient testing would be completely the fault of the engineer responsible for those duties.  However, there may be scenarios where the engineer is not completely at fault, for which we would need extensive and thorough investigation to determine who is liable.

Reading 04: Codes of Conduct

Are Codes of Conduct necessary in the field of computer science?  I believe that they are.  Codes of conduct provide ethical and moral guidelines for those that follow it.  By maintaining a code of conduct and following it, anyone can serve as an example of ideal behavior.  There are always going to be people who ignore the codes of conduct, but they would have done so anyways.  Rather than just have some unspoken rules that can be surmised as “don’t do the bad thing”, an explicit code of conduct serves as a concrete guideline for people to fall back on.  The article here talks about how “explicit is better than implicit,” and how it is better to explicitly state the standards we should hold ourselves to rather than just imply that everyone should be good.

Codes of conduct do serve a valid purpose.  From the same article as before, a code of conduct is “a set of rules outlining the responsibilities of or proper practices for an individual, party or organization.”  We do not live in a utopian society where everyone behaves as they should, people will break the law and do bad things.  We can’t necessarily stop all of them.  What we can do is create a set of guidelines for those that would follow them, in order to improve themselves and the computer science community as a whole.

Additionally, computer scientists can be a diverse group, especially when looking at open source or online communities.  The article here states the first purpose of the “Go” code of conduct was to “to specify a baseline standard of behavior so that people with different social values and communication styles can talk about Go effectively, productively, and respectfully.”

One thing that struck me as a very reasonable idea was how in the Ubuntu code of ethics it called for an individual to “step down considerately,” doing their best to minimize disruption to the project or position they are stepping down from.  I thought this was very interesting and quite thoughtful given that the lifespans of certain projects or products can be longer than the time one is employed or working on that project.  Like many of the other points in the “Community” section of the Ubuntu code of ethics, this goal was oriented at providing a helpful community that would promote better, more efficient work and exchange of ideas within the community.

Similarly, the “Go” code of ethics (mentioned above) sought to provide a behavioral baseline for its contributors.  The main idea being that regardless of social, ethical, political, sex, or any other factor, we should be able to contribute to the same goal or project meaningfully and effectively. I found this a very meritorious idea and hope that it can spread to the rest of the computer science community.

Some of the codes of conduct referenced not using offensive language or intending to offend anyone, which the article here has a bit of an issue with.  The article cites how “being offended” is a very subjective and voluntary act, and that the codes of conduct that state that individuals should avoid offending others may be a little naive.  I may not agree with some of the article’s ideas, but I agree with their closing remarks that you should never intend to offend someone.  I believe you should always try to be respectful to others and avoid causing distress, especially in an environment specifically for working on a project or code together effectively.