Position Paper 2:

 Breaches of Ethics 

Large companies and public figures sometimes cross line in the world of ethics to promote or improve their company even if that means ruffling some feathers. Recently in the world of news Google has made their way into headlines and not for the right reasons. Data collection is necessary in the world of artificial intelligence and recently in the collection of this data the use of ethics is missing. A google contractor offered african americans $5 gift cards for playing a "selfie game" and completing a demographic survey. The contractor failed to mention that while participants were playing this selfie game that it was capturing images of the users for a facial recognition algorithm. The recruitment firm Randstad did the work for the contractor approaching students, people attending the BET awards, and homeless people. When the workers from the firm were interviewed by The Daily News they revealed that they were told to specifically target homeless people with this opportunity because they would be very unlikely to understand what exactly they were agreeing to and "the least likely to say anything to the media." Google has tried to state their main focus of this project actually had good intentions. African Americans are underrepresented in datasets used to train these AI systems. This being said google created this idea to harvest different faces with darker skin tones to overall improve their ability to recognize non light toned faces. This new data was taken in to help make the facial recognition unlock feature on Google's new Pixel 4 Phone. Google has since said they have temporarily cancelled the project and are looking into Randstad for violating consent policies in their research. 

Google isn't the only company under fire when it comes to crossing the line in the world of ethics. IBM has recently been brought into the spotlight for taking images from photo sharing sites like Flickr and making the information gathered from them freely available for any academic researchers to use. The company failed to ask for user consent and is now facing backlash for their questionable methods of harvesting this information. Keeping up with the trend of Google, presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren has stated she wants to hire "an army of nerds to defeat Google's lobbyists." This statement comes from years of large tech firms for loads of issues especially record breaking data breaches coming from companies like Google and Facebook. Warren previously worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Where she says she saw first hand how lobbyists use their knowledge and advanced resources to take advantage of everyday people. Her point is backed by incidents like the one mentioned above with zero consent from the users and tricking them into playing games with data harvesting applications. 

The biggest issue we see is lobbyists tend to always play the "we understand and you just don't get it" card too often when issues are addressed. Now what is always said is that gathering new data to improve artificial intelligence is a rather sticky process. In the world of artificial intelligence today they require very large data sets to run and function at the highest level. To gather all of this data for proper functioning requires tons of personal and biometric data which can be hard to obtain without crossing the line of ethics every now and then. So does that make what Google and IBM did okay? Well of course not, taking peoples images without them knowing or having them play a "selfie game" to use that data for the betterment of artificial intelligence is never okay. Maybe companies instead of taking a sideways approach to ethics could potentially ask for participants for their data collection with small incentives or even just alerting them they are involved in research could solve these issues.   

In Green Bay an Alderman Andy Nicholson filed a complaint against a fellow council member Kathy Lefebvre for sharing confidential information. The information she is accused of leaking is supposedly from a closed session meeting. Their meeting discussed a purchase of property known as Bay Beach Amusement Park which turns out that Lefebvre isn't even on this board but was allowed to participate in the session. The issue here is that she told members of her neighborhood the vote tally and the final decision of the meeting. Videos have now been released of her apologizing for her breach of ethics when two other fellow council members spoke out on the issue. 

Whether the issues be in the world of politics or the complicated world of data gathering for artificial intelligence, there are still many boundaries that are being crossed. Will politicians speaking up on issues with larger firms like Google drawl more attention towards these issues in the world of ethics? News sources covering these issues are also helping bring a better understanding of these issues to 'ordinary people' as they were called in a statement made by Warren. Overall big and small companies still have a lot of room to grow in the world of ethics and how they handle getting consent from participants.