The Social Responsibility of Coding
summary
Concrete examples, numbers, and outcomes appear: MaxMind IP mapping and the farm that suffers 15 years of harassment, 14% of US addresses tied to one driveway, Theranos $9 billion fraud and resulting lawsuits, Blue Apron’s OSHA fines and workplace incidents, and Twitter’s 11-minute suspension incident. The talk names tools, describes what was built, shows what actually broke, and offers specific mitigations — who got hurt, who was punished, and practical steps like asking why data is collected and when to refuse requests for extra PII.
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chapters (33)
- 0:00Start
- 0:11The Social Responsibility of Coding
- 2:28pseudoscience
- 4:28600 million IP addresses
- 5:34all because of an ugly number
- 5:49You are powerless.
- 7:03technology is powerful because it's adaptable
- 8:16technology is problematic because it erases people
- 9:28technology is frivolous because it's cheap
- 10:19technology is dangerous because it's unchecked
- 10:59making stupid things
- 11:15breaking things, and people
- 12:02we need to think about some hard questions
- 12:17we need to understand our social responsibility
- 12:49is our consumption of technology responsible?
- 13:05are we using ethically produced technologies?
- 13:18are we creating ethical technologies?
- 13:41are we as individuals responsible for the impact of our code?
- 14:11are we responsibly gathering data and keeping it safe?
- 14:40our impact
- 15:14everything we do has an impact on others
- 15:31levels of impact
- 16:49a single decision many ramifications
- 17:48product decision or business decision?
- 18:40not about business needs versus engineering
- 20:26we need to own responsibility for the things we create
- 20:45impact meets responsibility
- 21:26the larger the impact, the larger the consequences
- 21:45understand why you're building the thing
- 22:03learn more about the business
- 22:18collaborate with a team
- 22:32think about resources
- 22:45talk to your colleagues
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