Organizing for your Ethical Principles
summary
Examples include Theranos producing bad test kits, Volkswagen cheating emissions tests, Cambridge Analytica running micro‑targeted propaganda, LaLiga’s app eavesdropping on users, and an ICE risk model that effectively always outputs detain. The talk argues for specific actions: run retrospectives and risk analyses, implement break‑glass procedures, encrypt and expire data, and minimize the data you collect so contact‑tracing logs, ad profiles, or recommender caches cannot be repurposed or leaked.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:06Content warning: Discussions of sexual harassment, racial and disability discrimination, state-sponsored violence, concentration camps, and genocide
- 1:39Tech has an ethics crisis.
- 7:44Society is paying the price of tech's ethical debt. The best time to act was several years ago The second best time to act is now.
- 12:14White supremacists are trying to recruit American teens through video games
- 14:4915+ years in tech, Head of Data, Anti-fascist, anti-racist activist and organizer; advisory board member of two extremism-related university-based labs Survivor of multiple assaults, attempted murder (3x), and terrorist attacks (2x)
- 16:02years as a manager (now no longer) Queer transgender woman of color Labor organizer & activist for 10+ years Activism covered in The New York Times, Wired, Gizmodo, Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Guardian, and other media.
- 16:59White supremacists work at your company.
- 18:03They are targeting marginalized colleagues.
- 19:35We're gonna kill you
- 21:082. Your skills matter
- 24:26Risks & Protections
- 26:32Successful Organizing
- 26:56Ethics is an integral part of our job. Ethics crises are a process failure. Continuous integration, deployment, ethics We need robust, reusable infrastructure.
- 29:15Be proactive. Prevent crises. Pick fights carefully.
- 29:48Resources
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