Ethics

Posts about professional ethics, research integrity, data privacy, intellectual property, and the moral dimensions of building software.

2026-05-21	Enshittification
2026-05-20	Setting the Standard
2026-05-17	Not So Selfish After All
2026-05-17	The Expanding Circle
2026-05-17	The Creation of Money
2026-05-14	Manufacturing Obedience
2026-05-14	Manufacturing Preferences
2026-05-13	The Corporation as Psychopath
2026-05-12	Keeping Up With Everybody
2026-05-11	Ransom as a Business Model
2026-05-10	Big Tech is Like the Yakuza
2026-05-10	Big Tech is Like Multi-Level Marketing
2026-05-10	Big Tech is Like Scientology
2026-05-09	Cooperatives
2026-05-09	Big Tech is Like Pro Wrestling
2026-05-08	Unsafe at Any Algorithm
2026-05-06	Algorithmic Criminal Justice
2026-05-05	Moral Panics and the Video Game Debate
2026-05-05	The Psychology of Building Harmful Things
2026-05-03	Other Kinds of Firms
2026-05-02	The Invention of Intellectual Property
2026-05-02	The Evolution of Morality
2026-05-01	Big Tech is Like a Danwei
2026-04-29	Big Tech is Like a Department Store
2026-04-28	Big Tech is Like the Penny Press
2026-04-28	The Geography of Industrial Harm
2026-04-27	Big Tech is Like Standard Oil
2026-04-27	Big Tech is Like the Sharecropping System
2026-04-26	Big Tech is Like the Enclosure Movement
2026-04-25	Cognitive Pollution Revisited
2026-04-25	Big Tech is Like the Beauty Industry
2026-04-25	Big Tech is Like a Fast Food Franchise
2026-04-25	Software Taboos
2026-04-24	Big Tech is Like the Stasi
2026-04-23	Big Tech as Payola
2026-04-22	Big Tech as the Medieval Church
2026-04-20	Big Tech is Like a Long Firm Fraud
2026-04-19	Big Tech is Like the Cocaine Cartels
2025-10-25	Cognitive Pollution
2025-07-16	Books For a Talk
2024-06-14	Narconomics and Big Tech
2024-01-17	The First Six Questions
2024-01-13	What's the Scratch of the Social Sciences?
2023-11-25	LLMs and Institutional Knowledge
2023-11-01	How to Reach the Unconverted?
2023-08-27	The Weizenbaum Test
2023-08-13	I Don't Know What to Think About AI
2023-01-08	Somewhere Between Hobbes and Wishful Thinking
2022-10-29	Escape From the Rest of Us
2022-08-25	Thoughts on the Hippocratic License
2022-08-07	The Sisyphus Test
2021-09-13	IQ and Personality Tests
2021-03-25	Paying for Drinks
2019-10-30	First Do No Harm
2019-10-17	Timeline of a Conversation That Never Happened
2019-08-04	No Support for Hate
2019-07-07	Deskilling Learning
2019-05-13	Buzzfeed on DataCamp
2019-04-22	DataCamp Clarifications
2019-04-15	An Exchange with DataCamp
2019-04-05	The Worst Behavior
2019-03-15	Christchurch and Shopify
2018-12-31	How Feasible is a Harassment Canary?
2018-05-06	Cigarettes and Shopify
2017-02-06	A Moral Equivalent of the Turing Test
2016-05-10	Accident or Malice
2014-11-18	IP Communism
2012-04-18	Behind the Scenes (or, the Ethics of Cultivating Discontent)
2012-02-29	Why 'Do Not Track' Matters
2010-07-19	BP Buying Up Scientists
2010-05-27	A Few Things You May Not Have Known About Andrew Wakefield
2010-05-27	I'm Not a Lawyer…
2010-04-12	The Chilling Effect of the GPL
2010-03-30	Why Do Students Cheat?
2010-03-11	Don't Ask, Don't Tell—Really
2010-01-12	Google and China
2009-10-09	Licensure
2009-08-25	Climate Change (Literally) on Trial
2009-05-01	Canada's Response
2009-04-23	The Penalty For Dishonesty Is Often Borne By Others
2009-03-02	Open Science and Autism's False Prophets
2009-02-11	History Is Written By The Victors
2008-12-18	Hacking the Rainforest
2008-08-06	Tony, Dan, LanSchool, and Doing the Right Thing
2008-06-06	Faking Results
2008-05-02	A Question for the Class
2008-02-04	You're Not Allowed To Use What You Learn In This Book
2007-10-10	Citizen Lab Guide to Bypassing Censorship
2007-10-09	Amazon Gets an SLA (But I Still Can't Use It)
2007-08-09	Schneier on Assurance
2007-06-28	Quinn's Argument: A Swing and a Miss
2007-06-26	The Danger of Danger
2007-02-01	Blackboard's Patent Pledge
2007-01-31	Why Ethics Matter
2006-11-27	Psiphon in the News Again
2006-09-23	Turnitin and Translucency
2006-07-07	Bitten by WGA
2006-04-12	BIND Patents
2006-03-30	Sea Code