Good to Know — January 21, 2016
What we’re keeping an eye on this week.
Expanded DNA databases, coming to a state near you.
What does it take for your DNA to end up in a state’s database?
In Vermont, current law requires a DNA sample to be taken from everyone convicted of a felony. But State Senator Dick Sears is looking to change that. As Elizabeth Hewitt reports in Valley News, Senator Sears’ “expanded program would include anybody convicted of a misdemeanor that carries a potential sentence of jail time.” After this expansion, the number of DNA samples collected annually in Vermont could double or quadruple — increasing from an average of about 2,000 collected samples per year to somewhere between 4,600 and 9,100 per year. “When we start building surveillance systems, which is really what the DNA database is, for the purpose of people proving their innocence, we’ve really turned a corner that is not a good sign for the age-old presumption of innocence that everybody is entitled to,” said Allen Gilbert, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
A similar expansion was just signed into law in New Jersey by Governor Chris Christie, requiring individuals convicted of specified and indictable “disorderly persons offenses” to have their DNA added to the State police database.
How should we think about ‘crowdworking’?
When we talk about the ‘gig economy’ and its impact, we often think about the grey area between a worker’s classification as an employee or independent contractor. But what about “crowdworking,” the digital equivalent of piecework, where work is assigned and accomplished task-by-task? How should we think about those workers?
Mary L. Gray — a researcher at Microsoft Research, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an associate professor in the Media School at Indiana University — helps us conceptualize the problem:
The problem is that no single party in this marketplace, where businesses find the equivalent of a day laborer and individuals are “at work” whenever they sign onto their accounts, is clearly responsible for workers’ safety and well being.
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This is not a simple matter of re-classifying crowdworkers as employees (though this must happen here, too, through enforcement of existing labor laws); rather we need to move beyond the fulltime-freelance divide to support workers no longer hitched to set hours or a fixed location. Maintaining a distinction between fulltime and freelance work doesn’t meet the business need and consumer demand for an all-hours, at-the-ready workforce. Nor does it address workers’ needs for portable healthcare, a basic income, paid leave, and retirement plans.
New broadband Internet privacy rules? A diverse coalition asks the FCC to act.
Yesterday, 59 organizations asked the FCC to begin a rulemaking process to better protect the privacy of broadband Internet users. Specifically, the organizations want the FCC “to protect consumers from having their personal data collected and shared by their broadband provider without affirmative consent, or for purposes other than providing broadband Internet access service.”
Facebook’s ‘emotional contagion’ shows a need to update our ethical approach.
A 2014 Facebook study — dubbed the “emotional contagion study” — ignited a serious debate. In the experiment, researchers altered content presented to more than 680,000 Facebook users during one week in 2012. Academics, advocates, and journalists immediately criticized the study, questioning the ethics of manipulating people’s emotions through Facebook.
In a new paper, Untangling research and practice: What Facebook’s “emotional contagion” study teaches us, danah boyd unpacks the collective response to the study and asks us to imagine a new “socio-technical approach to ethics that does not differentiate between corporate and research practices”:
I’m glad that this study has prompted an intense debate among scholars and the public, but I fear that it’s turned into a simplistic attack on Facebook over this particular study rather than a nuanced debate over how we create meaningful ethical oversight. The lines between research and practice are always blurred and information companies like Facebook make this increasingly salient. Any effort to regulate a company’s practices by creating artificial distinctions between research and business will not only fail to provide meaningful oversight, but will undermine the true goals of increasing ethical practices.
