Ethics hackers and ethics cyber security - new specialists needed in the digital age

Every week, the global public seems to be blindsided by new ways that the internet, social media, and data in our digital lives can be turned to harmful or malicious purposes. But why isn't more of our attention focused on new, creative, and thoughtful ways to tackle ethical problems combined with new technology, to create a better world?

In the tech world, hackers are typically malicious actors that find weaknesses and flaws in software or the systems around them. They exploit those flaws for their own gain, or to create chaos. On the flip side, cyber security experts have the technical know-how of hackers. They find the flaws, real or potential, and get a detailed handle on the worst case the scenarios. But they spend their time and energy coming up with solutions that protect from misuse and harm.

Although we expect technical security, recent news cycles have highlighted the ethical and political shaky ground underlying our digital products and services. Some of these issues have been around below the surface of the rapidly growing tech industry for a decade or more:

• Creators of digital devices struggle to balance rewarding return business with alarming data about addiction.
• Social media, and online communities of all kinds, grapple with their role in polarizing people's views, in politics and every day.
• Open communications channels draw criticism for not policing harassment, hate groups and more, while on the flip side deal with troubling demands from governments that may oppress dissidents or violate civil rights.
• Content hosting wants to be open to creators on one hand, but on the other wants to moderate troubling content - getting caught in outcry over restrictions and boycotts for lack of them.
• Fitness apps with global tracking reveal privacy- and security-threatening data, while private data is lost or stolen at a breakneck pace.

The truth is, these problems don't have easy answers we can "check a box" to cover. We can fail in many ways - we might even face contradictory demands or ambiguous answers that don't make sense. We have more people picking apart the problems than fixing them. In short, we have many, many "ethics hackers" - people pointing out the failings of incorporating healthy political, ethical systems with our digital lives. We don't have enough "ethics cyber security experts" - people who solidly know both fields of politics and technology, examining the real and potential weaknesses, and exploring sound, thoughtful, thorough solutions.

Data & Society is an excellent start for a dive into these topics. As one of their speakers recently cautioned a conference of tech innovators, we tend to have an overly-optimistic view of how virtuously our new ideas will affect the world, without giving enough thought to serious, but ambiguous ethical issues that may come up. Young entrepreneurs, especially in tech, often see themselves as rebels against the evil establishment with an over-simplification of how much good they'll do. Additionally, Time Well Spent founder Tristan Harris has spoken extensively about these problems and what we could do about them so we live up to that old Google motto, "don't be evil". We should all be able to call ourselves do-gooders. We may have all the best intentions, but as the reality checks mentioned above remind us, that's not enough.

We wouldn't approach a new business without a business plan or a new project without a team of experts to hammer out all the details. In the same way, we should approach the difficult terrain of business ethics in new technology and the digital world combined with a deep understanding of politics and ethics. This expertise is becoming a necessary part of the tech industry. We most certainly still should consult with legal counsel, security specialists, technical experts and our common sense. But we should also promote quality internal and public discourse around how our work impacts our political societies and the practical implementation of our (business, national, and universal) values.

• What is the responsibility of a business to ensure its product does no harm?
• How does the way we understand potentially "harmful" products evolve or stay the same for the digital age?
• How does the scalability, sharability, and persistence of digital products affect or change responsibility, prevention, mitigation of potential harm?
• What do we need to know about the relationship between digital products and potential harm, such as addiction? 
• advertising and marketing, such as for minors? 
• accountability for political speech? 
• digital "residential zoning", i.e. limiting noise, lights, hours of business for public health?
• What would we need to know about research-backed potential harm to make informed choices as users? - As creators, developers or sellers of these products?
• What is the responsibility of a business to align and communicate its ethics and values with society?
• How does the way we understand "ethical" business evolve or stay the same for the digital age?
• How does scalability, sharability, persistence and privacy affect or change the way we live our values?

It's not just that we need to understand these kinds of questions internally, but we also need to build quality public discourse and will to hold businesses and users accountable in ways that make sense. We need thoughtful discussion so we - as business owners, employees, customers, and citizens - take steps in the right direction towards policy and practice. We have the opportunity to learn from and leverage public energy to do the right thing, make the strongest case possible, and set a tone in the digital frontier that can resonate for years to come.

The latest broadside in the news should be a red flag that our current understanding, our common sense and pool of expertise, is insufficient. We can't wait around for "ethics hackers" to surprise us. The rapid, widespread impact of digital age ethics questions is both alarming and energizing as a call-to-action. The chance for positive impact of thoughtful, ethical understanding and action now is great. We can't afford to lose it.

6 months of no smartphone

6 months ago I wrote about taking an extended break from Facebook and trying to do better - with the bigger life problem: the distraction problem. Like working at the pizza shop and getting concerned about my all-pizza diet, I was bothered by how wrapped up in social media I felt. However, it's not just about one food. I found I had a habit of running to all kinds of distraction without thinking. At that point I had to admit, the biggest culprit was still attached to me: my smartphone.

I love the possibilities of new technology to improve our lives. But was this one right for me?

Forgetting not having one

Until I was halfway through high school, it wasn't a practical reality for everyone to have a phone on them. Even then, I didn't like the idea that I wouldn't get to choose when and where I was reachable and when I had "sacred" quiet time. I liked camping; at one point I'd learned orienteering (finding your way with a compass). It stuck with me how good it felt to take a walk and, sometimes, deliberately get lost.

But in the early 2000's, that became less and less possible. Over the course of 15 years through college and into adulthood, a small computer in my pocket became an ever-present part of my life. I traveled extensively for work into new states, I used GPS, music, searches for local food, churches, and more. I worked and took classes remotely, and had to connect from wherever I was. I organized big events, and tracked my plans. I got interested in marketing and technology, and generally existed as an extrovert, entangling myself in all sorts of smartphone conveniences and connections. I'd forgotten not having one.


I realized I wasn't happy with how things had evolved this year. I'd gotten over-saturated with social networks and entirely sick of dinging and beeping interruptions, not to mention disheartened by constantly checking the news. I was worried about what a kind of Wild West of digital social norms was doing, and I wanted to take some time to think about that. So I worked on setting myself some boundaries. I thought it would be hard but I could do it; I didn't really know what I was in for.

Setting boundaries

I'm a believer in the positive possibilities of the right technology to improve our lives. What usually trips us up, I think, is not thinking deliberately about it. We could set ourselves up better with good habits - like we do with personal diet and exercise; or we could create better societal rules for bigger deals - like we do with recycling, seatbelts, and FDA regulations. We haven't gotten very far regulating the digital world we live in, though I bet we will someday soon. So I gave myself a shot at making some personal changes. I set no-phone times and got an app for locking the screen on a timer. I talked to others in my life about when and how they could reach me, and tried to distance myself from "instant" messages unless urgent. I stopped using Facebook altogether for a while, and after deciding to open it again 6 months ago I widdled down the distracting features with tools like F.B. Purity and Social Fixer.

I still found myself with the nagging urge to break those self-imposed limits. It's normal - people have trouble with New Year's resolutions for a reason - but of course it's frustrating. Without thinking I'd catch myself on my phone, doing just one more thing, then another. I'd look up and see everyone on the bus, the sidewalk, in their cars, in the cafe, at the party, wrapped up in their phones - including me. It's not just something I came up with on a whim that smartphones are having a troubling effect on people's minds and emotions, often without us realizing it. Research is starting to show that nagging feeling things are too often out of balance may be rooted in something more serious.

Besides, the more I heard "How can anyone live without a smartphone!" the more I had the strong impulse to huck mine off a cliff.

So I did.

Cold turkey

I am stubborn; this is my work and my treasure. I decided half-measures weren't enough and sold my smartphone back. I'd quit Facebook for half a year, why not smartphones next? It felt good to call my own bluff.

A baffled phone store employee, practically having an existential crisis on my behalf, helped me switch to a 1990's era clamshell, a real brick that laughed in the face of the phrase "mobile optimized". The web browser was a broken time travel machine that could only see one page from 1992.  I'd text about half a sentence before giving up and making a phone call.

It was perfect.


I felt a bit curmudgeonly, and resolved myself I was OK with that. It seemed a fair exchange for leaving the "young" off of "young adult" as I am now firmly in my 30's. I couldn't GPS, I couldn't Uber. I asked people to call or visit in person instead of text long, confusing conversations. My coworker half-joked about whether I could function on a business trip.

Most people were tolerant about this whole life choice I was making, but one thing was pretty clear. This was different than just not liking Facebook. People who sadly nodded their heads and agreed they'd love to take a break too when I talked about quitting Facebook, now stared blankly at me or immediately swore they'd never leave their own smartphones. It was too important, too vital, too tied into everything they did and needed and enjoyed. Many people simultaneously said they had a problem - i.e. they admitted to breaking their own limits and not liking it, or not feeling like they could really stop themselves - and said it wasn't that bad.

I'd given myself no choice but to stick with it anyway, or else I don't know if I could disagree. I'd felt the exact same way.

I'm not a Luddite who wants to grab people's phones and smash them, but I think we could stand to question it when we feel cut off instead of connected, when we see everyone's looking down, all the time.

I live in a busy city, and I walk by an intersection every day where a woman my age was hit and killed in the crosswalk. I debate with myself how effective it would be to say to passersby, please look up. Please take care of yourself. They're usually just annoyed with me. I usually don't.

Why do this

Well, even if that weren't the case, even beyond my right to be an annoying stubborn old person if that's living the dream for me, I felt committed to the idea that we each have the right to determine our own quiet time. It resonated with high-school me, first resisting a cell phone because Edward Abbey said every free American has the right to get lost, sunburnt, and eaten by bears. We should be allowed, and able to stand firm to say "no" to things even if we feel pressured into them because of convenience, artificial urgency, or because everyone's doing it.

Over the spring and summer, into the fall, it's only recently I notice myself not craving to check my phone any more. It's taken, realistically, months for that to really change. I gradually remembered things I used to have to write down or check ahead of time, like bus times, phone numbers, what I was doing that afternoon. I could work to make club communications more widely accessible. I could get a work phone. But the real difference is more profound.

It feels like I'm starting to get my attention back. Not to be overly dramatic, but I force myself to do whatever I'm doing - ride the bus, look at the sunrise, notice people around me - instead of by default, thinking about my phone. Sure, I could do this before. People can and do set aside their smartphones, detox and unplug. People can use them as great aids, planners and communicators and organizers, then put them in a fixed place and set firm boundaries. Maybe I simply had trouble with this myself, and like anyone's personal health journey, with steps forward and back, you'll find differences and similarities to help you with your own. But there's something pretty important I was having trouble with when I had a smartphone on me. It was always there, even when I didn't want it to be. It always had a piece of my attention, and I could rarely give my whole attention, 100%, to anything else.

I was having trouble forgetting what it was like having one. I was, I'd say, unable to imagine living without one.

I don't think I'm going to get a smartphone again, not for a while. Maybe never. It's too valuable a thing to sit and think about sunrises and nothing else.

Politics & keeping your sanity

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so before I get into anything else, this is always a good share: Ask Take This: how to support a friend with depression and more. (Thank you, Bill!) Mental health challenges come in a wide variety, and this is a great article on being a good friend no matter what someone is dealing with.

Second, last year about this time I started a pushup challenge for Mission 22 from a friend and started conversations about taking better care of our veterans. Still very relevant today. What I like best about this kind of challenge is (in addition to donating and working for better social services) raising awareness can help directly: the more people think about what they can do, and dispel the myths and stigma around mental health, the better we will tend to be toward each other. 

Which brings me to today's thoughts. This year I'm focusing on a hard lesson for me personally: staying engaged with civic dialogue and civic action in a healthy way.

How the heck do we even read the news and just take care of our mental health? Problems piling on from "staying engaged" can seem to strain our capacity for empathy, patience, and just dealing with difficulty. It feels like this year is particularly bad in the United States. Even if that were just the impression we were getting from TV, social media, and Thanksgiving dinner, we've still got some tough questions to face:

• How would we like to be treated by friends and family who disagree with us?
• How are we treating them? Is the Golden Rule enough?
• What would we like kids to learn to do to resolve differences, reach compromise - or react when things don't go smoothly, or they face intolerance and unfairness?
• What are we doing to take care of ourselves when things get to us?
• How do we keep from confusing venting (or "winning points") with trying to actually share understanding, improve our relationships, or build support for good ideas?
• How do we keep from shutting down when we're needed - by our friends, family, community, world?

I don't know how to say how urgent this all is to figure out, except this way: Politics is people - government is people. I can't imagine we'll get far without acknowledging that the whole thing and how the world works is tangled up with our day-to-day relationships, our day-to-day impulses, differences and how we deal with them, disappointments and wrongdoing and what it does to us.

If age-old aggression still finds a place to be nurtured in my own heart, how can joy and peace in this world ever be found?

I am working on remembering that I need to both take care of myself, and not shut down to the troubled world. Improving the system isn't a far-off concept, separate from us. It's the same as improving all these things that happen between me and other people. Both inching us towards a better society is needed - and also dealing sanely with inevitable human mistakes, wrongdoing, not living up to what we wish others to be and what we wish ourselves to be. Our processes, plans, rules and culture aren't separate from us and our messiness, The System was never some other entity. It's friends, families, strangers. Kids watching you.

It's you, and me, dealing with things that seem overwhelming, frustrating, never-ending - sometimes needing a break, or support, or forgiveness, or a change - and deciding to return and keep trying to do something good anyway.

I am working on upholding what I feel is most important (compassion for others, not letting frustration and anger consume me) and at the same time, fighting for what is right. On one hand, there's an impulse to be very righteously angry, and I feel that is understandable - hot things burn, injustice hurts. On the flip side, my guess would be, for someone to say "I don't care about politics" is a defensive impulse, when people are trying to protect themselves against this overwhelming feeling about what's going on by shutting off. Understandable as they may be, I think these extremes - getting addicted to anger, hardening, shutting off - would be a mistake. They would ultimately wear us down and cut us off from doing anything useful, or what may be more important, from living whole lives open to all the good we can do and see that's wrapped up with the experience of living, of relating to other people who are inherently imperfect. What can we do deal healthily, one step at a time, with both the wonders and the troubles of humanity? How do you take care of yourself, and get back up to keep going?

"We can help this troubled world. If these teachings make sense to us, can we commit to them? In these times, do we really have a choice?" - Pema Chodron

Reflecting on a half year off Facebook

Since September, I've been taking a break from Facebook. I actually use a lot of social media for work; I've compared taking a personal Facebook break to working in the pizza shop, and I needed to seriously rethink my own pizza intake.

I deactivated my personal account for the last 6 months. As I'm considering what's next, I wanted to be honest about what was a success and what I failed at, and make some commitments to hopefully help me in the future.

My main takeaway is this: a break really helped me consider things I'd taken for granted. There's no received wisdom about the healthy balance for new technology in our lives - we each have to figure that out for ourselves.

We each have to figure out the healthy balance for new technology in our lives. Whether a long or a short break helps, it deserves some thought.

Here are the main things I found helpful to think about.

Value vs. time put in - what's right for me?

I'm an extrovert, so I usually feel particularly comfortable, fluent, and refreshed when socializing. But instead I often felt drained by time on my personal social media. I was determined to make it work, but pouring in more time just made me feel exhausted.

Stepping back helped me sort out what was happening. Social media burnout told part of the story - I needed to better balance quality vs. quantity. I had an embarrassment of riches when it comes to interactions and entertainment. Before, I wasn't looking at each particular activity, and whether it was fulfilling its social promise in the same way online as in real life. Sometimes it did; sometimes I had assumed it was.

What was different about messages vs. live conversations? A note sent directly to a person vs. a post to the world? Was I actually getting to know "Friends of Friends" three or four times removed?

I found I didn't experience the kind of terrible loss I thought I might by cutting online activities for a while. I was actually fine. I made other arrangements, friends found me and I found them, or we had an every-once-in-awhile note or call instead of every day. As much as quitting induced a knee-jerk anxiety that all my friends would mourn me as if I'd died and my social life would fall apart, it wasn't as essential as I'd let myself start to think.

When I get anxious over disconnecting for a bit in the future, it's good to remind myself it's no big deal. It's actually going to be fine.

There are definitely things that I still consider valuable, even after some thought. Like the ease of finding photos and events, the fact most people's "family newsletters" were on Facebook now, and how a thoughtful personal note to or from a friend felt good in any format. But I really needed the perspective. And I honestly needed to take a hard look at how easy it was for me to slip from something specific and valuable, into aimless internet-browsing.

It was easier to notice after I cut cable TV (years ago) and Facebook. Whenever my mind would wander, I'd have the impulse to just see what's on, or scroll through an endless newsfeed. But it's honestly something I've failed at even without those media: I would find myself opening up YouTube, rechecking the newspaper, or even reloading my email too many times for that "junkfood" media consumption, just because it was there.

Being more aware and deliberate about how I spent my free time is exactly what I wanted to get better at. And it wasn't working.

It isn't just a problem with Facebook, or TV, I realized, but a problem with distraction: fear of being bored is a huge challenge to overcome. Add to that fear of missing out; worry about our own image; and of course, naturally wanting to socialize or be "in the know". These all led me to spend time on impulse I might otherwise choose to spend differently. I might rather turn my daydreams into art or go out in person - but social media is so easy. Like a credit card makes it easy to spend money frivolously, Facebook allowed me to keep spending time and wonder where it all went. It many many things very convenient - but at a cost if I wasn't careful.

Facebook is like a credit card for time. Having it in my pocket made it very easy to spend without thinking.

I determined to at least cut down on owning too many "credit cards" or easy time-wasters. My smartphone is the biggest culprit right now. I need to actively work on mindfulness - trying to develop some basic better habits. I'll always face the challenge not to flee from discomfort into distractions every time my mind wanders.

Still, that wasn't the whole story.

"Best" or "best fit" communication

Reflecting on time, mindfully, was a good start. But on another level, I was also getting actively frustrated that writing more - in text, chat, comments and news feeds - actually seemed to communicate less.

Miscommunication isn't anything new. But humans are notoriously bad at tone and other important cues with text - and we consistently think we're much better than we are. The volume of text in our personal lives has exploded. With two thirds of all Americans online with smartphones, text and the problems that come with it are now delivered directly to us, constantly - in a flood. We assume a lot about the "best" mode for our message: that the people we have in mind will receive it in the same frame of mind as us; it'll be read and understood about how we intended; everyone's going to have about the same experience as we have with similar things, regardless of differences in schedule, personality, or distractions big or small.

It's even harder as social contexts often collide and clash. Etiquette and unspoken assumptions people share in different social contexts - like work, the bar, your family room, or broadcasting on a talk show - might be jarringly mismatched and mixed together. Social media and messenger apps interrupt us everywhere. We can't know when and where our messages will be read, or who will "overhear" them (in fact, we make assumptions about that too, which are rarely accurate). The boundaries are blurred, and keeping them becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

I've dealt with this sort of reality before, having worked in government, public relations, and marketing. Public figures often learn to speak and write carefully to very diverse and clashing audiences.

Perfecting this difficult PR skill - being aware of how far and wide every word might go, and using new etiquette accordingly - is now tacitly demanded of pretty much everyone.

It can be alarming that everything online is public/shareable/on permanent record by default. Our descendants could research their family tree, our high schoolers could map their town's history with sample quotes from Facebook. How many of us have really accepted and adjusted to that reality?

Although young people growing up with social media have started learning this "public-by-default" mode, this social media space is new, and young, and quickly changing, for all of us.

Growing pains of learning and adopting this new form of communication are, plainly and simply, a reality now. Human mistakes will be made, frustrations will continue to exist as people learn and we all attempt to navigate a difficult space.

For myself, firm boundaries, a long-form blog, and defaulting to meet more in-person have been very helpful. I also allow myself to be limited in my connectivity, and take deliberate technology breaks and off time. I would rather deal with some slight inconveniences than set myself up for more burnout. Communication is hard enough as it is.

Texting and social media are here to stay. But it's OK to set boundaries.

All of these things added up for me personally and made a break very worthwhile. I'd recommend it to anyone to get a better personal perspective on this complex and overwhelming tool that has become a daily part of our lives. But there are also bigger things going on.

This didn't happen in a vacuum.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room:
The election

The truth is, globally, we're all right at the very beginning of figuring out privacy expectations, ethics, how we treat each other - even the truth with the new reality of the internet, smartphones and social media. People's ideas about how these should fit into their own lives vary wildly, and don't always mix in happy ways. Societies have always had phases of figuring out how to behave with new communication or technology. We're now in a new frontier of forming social norms and rules with a billion people in shared virtual space.

Which brings us to the 2016 US election. Or a lot of politics around the world in the digital age.

The 2016 US election and aftermath have drastically changed the discussion. This happened in the background of my own frustrations, but surely contributed to them. What was once a personal question - "Am I spending a little too much time in distraction, or miscommunication? Is this a healthy balance?" - has become a society-wide reckoning with effects on democracy, psychology, civil debate, group behavior and more.

What was once a personal question - "Am I spending a little too much time in distraction, or miscommunication? Is this a healthy balance?" - has become a society-wide reckoning.

A great good that's come from this is the honest conversation around activism and change with the reality of social media. Over the past 6 months I've had more (in-person) conversations with more serious, actionable ideas about community organizing and social media than I've had in the past 6 years. We've made a lot of assumptions about how the internet will change society and democracy, and this year has acted as a wake-up call that it's not necessarily going how we thought - we need to take a more deliberate, proactive role to affect positive change.

Though maybe I shouldn't be, I've been perplexed by the way people's behavior changes online. I can't seem to shrug off the common assumption that online abuse is the "norm".  The more I hear "that's just the way it is" the more I question that's the way it has to be. And seeing a public figure shrug and engage in bullying, mob mentality, willful miscommunication - it's disappointing. Indulging our worst impulses won't help us lead better lives. These are all forces we're going to need to examine thoughtfully and maturely in our own lives, and let's face it, in our country and our globalized culture. I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. But I want to try and do better.

At the most basic level, shouldn't we take a moment to deeply consider what might happen in an uncontrolled social experiment with 7.5 million kids?

For me, it's still personal. I think people have the right to set their own boundaries. Decisions like when to have privacy, who to associate with, and how to spend our time are deeply personal ones. But now, as concerns about weakening civic dialogue have come to light, it's personal on a new level.

It's not that social media - or any new form of communication - is a societal evil in itself. That's the wrong message. Ultimately, I'll try to find a place for social media in my life within limits, as I try to use what I've learned to live in a more mindful way. But we do need to talk about how new incentives, new products and new behaviors fit into our lives. We need to deeply consider how it's affecting us, not just the extreme cases but the everyday of how we're being treated and treating others, how we're thinking about our time and relationships, and if what's really happening matches the picture in our heads of what we think is happening.

 Ultimately, I'll try to find a place for social media in my life within limits, as I try to use what I've learned to live in a more mindful way.

We need to be free to reflect, to change, to question what we're doing just because everyone else is doing it, to try to make our lives better - and if need be, to walk back a path we've taken, whether or not we choose to return that way again.

"Friends" social media as your virtual living room

Picture everyone in your "friends" social media circle at a big (virtual) house party. The space is shared by friends, acquaintances, family, mentors, mentees. Each Comment, Like, and Share opens the door to other friends to walk in.

Let's say I open the door to my or my friend's house and let in someone who ends up being extremely rude, ignorant, upset or vitriolic. I'd consider it my responsibility to talk to them, and if I have to, remove them from the living room. I picture the faces of everyone I know who hears such words as if they were sitting on my couch, stunned, hurt, or waiting for my reply. What's the right response?