This post comes after reading DataCités: Data as a commons for Smart City.
I really liked the term “invisible economy”, how we don’t realize that the cost we are paying for all this apparently free services is the constant stream of information we are giving up to these big corporations. One of the biggest problems that all this creates is that our public data is used for private purposes by big corporations, as well as algorithms being given absolute control in possibly important part of our lives, like the insurance example the article gave.
This all undermines the collective ownership principle that Smart Cities wants to portray, “Civil society, too, is caught between the incontestable benefits of these services and a growing uncertainty about the fate of its data. “. This all comes with big tech companies pushing for even less regulation on their data gathering activites, with Silicon Tech companies recently pushing for more ‘self-regulation’ and less legislation in the US.
“Digital intelligence is neither inherently virtuous nor corrupt; however, as efficient as these technologies may be, we must continue to critically reflect upon the type of city we want.” This is very tied to the lack of ethics in the current tech industry, most programmers, I must say that including myself, view users as some kind of dumb entity that will be interacting with our system, granting us some input for us to process and spurting out something for them. I feel there needs to be a class specifically dedicated to professional ethics in the software industry, because there are some classes that do show some code of ethics, like the ACM one, but they just turn into another topic in the course that will be forgotten by students the next semester. Companies need to realize that algorithms making decisions that affect the life of millions of people greatly, need some kind of regulation to ensure their effectiveness, as well as some kind of control that prevents bias, because no matter how impartial one as a developer tries to be, we all have biases and preferences that have grown into us as we have grown up.
Pretty much everything that involves the use of a person’s information for financial gain needs to be regulated. Data is still being treated as a resource you can easily obtain and OWN, as if it was some kind of mineral (data mining, duh).
I’ve written about this in my ethics essay (in spanish):
Check it out, as well as the references for additional information.
Carlos Rueda Blog 