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Thanks for writing. I’m inspired to write a couple of comments in response.

First, are academic, professional ethicists as irrelevant as you suggest? (Okay, that’s a bit of a strawman framing, but I hope the response is still useful.)

Floridi is an interesting example. I’m also a fan of his work (although I know him more for his philosophy of information work — I like to cite him on semantics/ontologies, for example (Floridi 2013) — rather than his ethics work), but he’s also in the news this week because he’s on Google’s panel of experts (their “Advisory Council”) for determining the right balance in processing right-to-be-forgotten requests.

Also, I think we see the influence of these ethical and other academic theories play out in practical terms, even if they’re not cited in a direct company response to a particular scandal. For example, you can see Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity theory of privacy (Nissenbaum 2004) throughout the Federal Trade Commission’s 2012 report on privacy (FTC 2012), even though she’s never explicitly cited. And, forgive me for rooting for the home team here, but I think Ken and Deirdre’s research of “on the ground” privacy (Bamberger and Mulligan 2011) played a pretty prominent role in the White House framework for consumer privacy (“Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy” 2012).

But second, I’m even more excited about your conclusion. Yes, decentralize!, despite the skepticism about it (Narayanan et al. 2012). But more than just repeating that rallying cry (which I still think needs repeating – I’m trying to support #indieweb as my part of that), is the form of the problem.

I think a really cool project that everybody who cares about this should be working on is designing and executing on building that alternative to Facebook. That’s a huge project. But just think about how great it would be if we could figure out how to fund, design, build, and market that. These are the big questions for political praxis in the 21st century.

Politics in our century might be defined by engineering challenges, and if that’s true, then it emphasizes even more how coding is not just entangled with, but is itself a question of, policy and values. I think our institution could dedicate a group blog just to different takes on that.

—Nick

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Labels: politics, ethics, facebook, ischool, engineering