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1. Dark Patterns and the Legal Requirements of Consent Banners: An Interaction Criticism Perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445779  

   Gray, Colin M. ; Santos, Cristiana ; Bielova, Nataliia ; Toth, Michael ; Clifford, Damian ( May 2021 , CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing)

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   User engagement with data privacy and security through consent banners has become a ubiquitous part of interacting with internet services. While previous work has addressed consent banners from either interaction design, legal, and ethics-focused perspectives, little research addresses the connections among multiple disciplinary approaches, including tensions and opportunities that transcend disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, we draw together perspectives and commentary from HCI, design, privacy and data protection, and legal research communities, using the language and strategies of “dark patterns” to perform an interaction criticism reading of three different types of consent banners. Our analysis builds upon designer, interface, user, and social context lenses to raise tensions and synergies that arise together in complex, contingent, and conflicting ways in the act of designing consent banners. We conclude with opportunities for transdisciplinary dialogue across legal, ethical, computer science, and interactive systems scholarship to translate matters of ethical concern into public policy. 

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2. The impact of cross-kingdom molecular forensics on genetic privacy

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-021-01076-z  

   Elhaik, Eran ; Ahsanuddin, Sofia ; Robinson, Jake M. ; Foster, Emily M. ; Mason, Christopher E. ( May 2021 , Microbiome)

   Recent advances in metagenomic technology and computational prediction may inadvertently weaken an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Through cross-kingdom genetic and metagenomic forensics, we can already predict at least a dozen human phenotypes with varying degrees of accuracy. There is also growing potential to detect a “molecular echo” of an individual’s microbiome from cells deposited on public surfaces. At present, host genetic data from somatic or germ cells provide more reliable information than microbiome samples. However, the emerging ability to infer personal details from different microscopic biological materials left behind on surfaces requires in-depth ethical and legal scrutiny. There is potential to identify and track individuals, along with new, surreptitious means of genetic discrimination. This commentary underscores the need to update legal and policy frameworks for genetic privacy with additional considerations for the information that could be acquired from microbiome-derived data. The article also aims to stimulate ubiquitous discourse to ensure the protection of genetic rights and liberties in the post-genomic era.

    

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3. Social responsibility views in science and engineering: An exploratory study among engineering undergraduate researchers

   Fernandez, K. ; Rivera-Jimenez, SM. ( July 2023 , American Society for Engineering Education, 2023)

   In 2017, the report Undergraduate Research Experiences for STEM Students from the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) invited research programs to develop experiences that extend from disciplinary knowledge and skills education. This call to action asks to include social responsibility learning goals in ethical development, cultural issues in research, and the promotion of inclusive learning environments. Moreover, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) all agree that social responsibility is a significant component of an engineer’s professional formation and must be a guiding force in their education. Social Responsibility involves the ethical obligation engineers have to society and the environment, including responsible conduct research (RCR), ethical decision-making, human safety, sustainability, pro bono work, social justice, and diversity. For this work, we explored the views of Social Responsibility in engineering students that could provide insight into developing formal and informal educational activities for future summer programs. In this exploratory multi-methods study, we investigated the following research question: What views of social responsibility are important for engineering students conducting scientific in an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)? The REU Site selected for this study was a college of engineering located at a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant research university. The Views of Social Responsibility of Scientists and Engineers (VSRoSE) was used to guide our research design. This validated instrument considers the following major social responsibility elements: 1) Consideration of societal consequences, 2) Protection of human welfare and safety, 3) Promotion of environmental sustainability, 4) Efforts to minimize risks, 5) Communication with the public, and 6) Service and Community engagement. Data collection was conducted at the end of their 10-week-long experience in Summer 2022 using Qualtrics. REU students were invited to complete an IRB-approved questionnaire, including collecting demographic data, the VSRoSE-validated survey, and open-ended questions. Open-ended questions were used to explore what experiences have influenced positive student views of social responsibility and provide rich information beyond the six elements of the VSRoSE instrument. The quantitative data from the VSRoSE is analyzed using SPSS. The qualitative data is analyzed by the research team using an inductive coding approach. In this coding process, the researchers derive codes from the data allowing the narrative or theory to emerge from the raw data itself, which is great for exploratory research. The results from this exploratory study will help to strategically initiate a formal and informal research education curriculum at the selected university. In addition, the results may serve as a way for REU administrators and faculty to create metrics of impact on their research activities regarding social responsibility. Finally, this work intends to provoke the ethics and research community to have a deeper conversation about the needs and strategies to educate this unique population of students. 

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4. Reversing Privacy Risks: Strict Limitations on the Use of Communications Metadata and Telemetry Information

   Landau, Susan ; Vargas Leon, Patricia ( October 2023 , Colorado technology law journal)

   In this paper, we examine private-sector collection and use of metadata and telemetry information and provide three main contributions: First, we lay out the extent to which “non-content”—the hidden parts of Internet communications (aspects the user does not explicitly enter) and telemetry—are highly revelatory of personal behavior. We show that, privacy policies notwithstanding, users rarely know that the metadata and telemetry information is being collected and almost never know the uses to which it is being put. Second, we show that consumers, even if they knew the uses to which this type of personal information were being put, lack effective means to control the use of this type of data. The standard tool of notice-and-choice has well known problems, including the user’s lack of information with which to make a choice; and then, even if the user had sufficient information, doing so is not practical.49 These are greatly exacerbated by the nature of the interchanges for communications metadata and telemetry information. Each new transmission—each click on an internal link on a webpage, for example—may carry different implications for a user in terms of privacy. The current regimen, notice-and-choice, presents a completely unworkable set of requests for a user, who could well be responding many times a minute regarding whether to allow the use of metadata beyond the purposes of content delivery and display. This is especially the case for telemetry, where the ability to understand both present and future use of the data provided from the sensors requires a deeper understanding of what information these devices can provide than anyone but a trained engineer would know. Third, while there has been academic and industry research on telemetry’s use, there has been little exploration of the policy and legal implications stemming from that use. We provide this factor, while at the same time addressing the closely related issues raised by industry’s use of communications metadata to track user interests and behavior 

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5. The Amazon Effect: A Case Study of Corporate Influence on Student Macro-Ethical Reasoning

   Abdurrahman, F. N. ; Chudamani, S. ; Turpen, C. A. ; Radoff, J. ; Elby, A. ; Tomblin, D. ( June 2023 , Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland)

   As the field of engineering faces looming societal issues, it becomes particularly important to foster more “holistic engineers” with systems-thinking skills and an understanding of the macro-ethical impacts of their work (Canny and Bielefeldt, 2015) Macro-ethics here refers to the collective social responsibility of engineers as a profession, as opposed to micro-ethics, which concern activities within the profession (Herkert, 2005). However, college students studying engineering in the United States exhibit a decline in concern for public welfare over the course of their education (Cech, 2014) as well as a tendency to orient to micro-ethical issues over macro-ethical issues (Schiff et al, 2020). Scholars attribute these trends to ideologies pervasive in engineering spaces, such as depoliticization of engineering practice, technocracy, and meritocracy (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). While Cech (2014) argues these status quo ideologies in engineering are maintained by a “culture of disengagement” that decreases interest in public welfare, Radoff et al. (2022) find indications that additional factors contribute to engaged students’ reproduction of such ideologies. They find, for example, instances of students in reproducing dehumanizing narratives regarding low-income communities, despite their enrollment in a voluntary program premised on cultivating socially responsible STEM professionals. This finding suggests that even students who remain “engaged” to some degree can reproduce status quo ideologies which Cech (2014) attributes to disengagement. One explanation as to why a macro-ethically “engaged” student may fail to attend to the social aspects of design follows a deficit narrative: a lack of knowledge or ability. We see this assumption in comparisons of students’ and experts’ design processes, where the areas in which students behave differently than experts are interpreted as areas that require additional instruction on how to behave more like the experts (Atman et al., 2008). This presupposition of students’ lacking knowledge or skills, however, backgrounds contextual or interactional factors. Philip et al. (2018) challenges such assumptions in their analysis of a classroom discussion on the ethics of drone warfare, which exemplifies students’ convergence to American nationalism, but with the framing that this convergence is interactionally created, rather than the result of individual students’ stable, dogmatic beliefs. However, because their analysis is limited to the scope of a single class discussion, the extent to which students’ performance is situated in said class remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt to understand the ways in which students reproduce ideologies dominant in engineering, as well as the situated nature of students’ ideological orientations in collaborative work. We consider a case study focus group from Radoff et al. (2022) where students reasoned through a hypothetical design scenario about a grocery store. We show how, despite many opportunities where problematic status-quo narratives are momentarily challenged, the students generally reject the challenges, not by arguing against them, but by positioning them outside the scope of their work. Further, we show how these moments of rejection are tightly coupled with attempts to emulate the multinational technology company Amazon. Finally, we use additional data to illustrate the situatedness of one student’s performance, and theorize the influence of Amazon as a “strange attractor” in this student’s situated reasoning. 

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