So HN, many of us have worked on User Experiences, Analytics Pipelines, User Graphs and other such technologies. Many of us have seen, participated in or personally built systems that, upon reflection and among new laws and news about privacy travesties, may be a source of regret. Besides the excellent work at darkpatterns.org, I'm not aware of any real 'rules of the road' outside of privacy laws, nor if I had a serious concern how to properly report it.
What is the brass tacks right way forward for us to create or embrace a system to define ethical behavior on the web, and to expose unethical behavior. What about enforcement? How can this be done in a way that ensures freedom? Or is it impossible to police the web?
I see a few ways forward:
- Status quo, private companies making individual actions internally, driven with a fiduciary responsibility for profit.
- A benefit corp offering some auditing, credibility, and feedback layer on the web as a paid/freely available service.
- Public firewall-as-a-service sort of wiki + LD API that gives users the ability to control their own subscriptions to information filters, flags, and warnings.
What is the brass tacks right way forward for us to create or embrace a system to define ethical behavior on the web, and to expose unethical behavior. What about enforcement? How can this be done in a way that ensures freedom? Or is it impossible to police the web?
I see a few ways forward:
- Status quo, private companies making individual actions internally, driven with a fiduciary responsibility for profit.
- A benefit corp offering some auditing, credibility, and feedback layer on the web as a paid/freely available service.
- Public firewall-as-a-service sort of wiki + LD API that gives users the ability to control their own subscriptions to information filters, flags, and warnings.
- Global internet police authority.
Full Disclosure: that last one was bait.