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Welcome to late-stage Silicon Valley, folks, where Facebook’s announcement that they’re adding dating features and the revelation that they had to fire someone for using their inside access to Facebook profiles to stalk women come less than 24 hours apart.
Perhaps it’s time to have some kind of Hippocratic Oath for data or a computer/data science equivalent of a Pugwash (a series of conferences for scientists and engineers to bring their expertise, insight, and reason to threats brought about by the weaponization of science and technology).
While I’m on the topic, here’s some additional reading:
- Cathy “Mathbabe” O’Neil, author of the excellent book Weapons of Math Destruction, is interviewed by Wired UK in this article, To work for society, data scientists need a hippocratic oath with teeth about her idea for such an oath.
- Virginia Eubanks: A Hippocratic Oath for Data Science
- Kottke.org: DNA sites show why we need a Hippocratic Oath for data science
- dj patil: A Code of Ethics for Data Science
- Tech@Bloomberg: Data scientists to develop their own version of the ‘Hippocratic Oath’