# Ethics in software --- # Who am I? - Christos Christodoulou - Physicist by education - Worked as data engineer and data scientist - Currently working as Engineering manager at Klarna (financial services) in Berlin --- ## Why this talk? - To increase awareness - To stress that we should develop a long lasting habit of engaging into discussions that have as a topic the ethics of the software we build --- ## We are being intensively tracked :scream: --- I stumbled upon this tweet  --- Which I saw later being feature in site that reaches probably a bigger and more diverse audience  --- The finding was actually old news, but not so much publicised before  --- ## It is ubiquitous that most of big sotware companies try to track what we do any way possible --- ## Not only software companies - Non-software companies like Xerox and Canon were using a Machine Identification Code (see Wikipedia) since the 1980s to add a digital watermark on printed paper - Work has even been done to develop privacy software to avoid this tracking, in order to support whistleblowers - It feels like history being repeated, with more advanced digital technology --- You can check photos from facebook by yourselves, by looking into the EXIF metadata: - Online tool: `http://exif.regex.info/exif.cgi` - Python Imaging Library: `PIL` --- ## What about the ethics in software technology? --- ### Ethics > The moral principles governing the behavior or actions of an individual or a group. - So this definition can be seen as a set of decision rules used to determine how a software behaves --- ### Software design - Decision rules come after software designers (mostly humans currently) sit down, discuss about the software they want to implement and create some diagrams and some documentation <!--These discussions and the final realisation of the software embody the opinions of the creators, their own ethics and their awareness and so on --> - It is safe to say that the "_ethics of a technology (or product) starts with the ethics of its creation, and its creators_" - After the design, the software is implemented and most of the times some form of a product emerges --- ## Coming to AI --- ### Why is AI important? - _Cliche:_ ML based technology has been gaining momentum and will strongly impact our lives - More difficult to track what is happening in a system that learns from data vs a rule-based system --- ### What is the impact of AI technology? - Most of the times not obvious at first, but becomes obvious as second order effects --- ### What to ask - What is the **ethical quality** of a prediction? - Is the decision based on that prediction morally wrong? - Does it impact humans in a good or bad way? - Does it violate privacy? - Does it lead to discrimination and harm? - ... --- ## Sources - [Hitchhicker's guide to AI Ethics](https://towardsdatascience.com/ethics-of-ai-a-comprehensive-primer-1bfd039124b0) - [Facebook Embeds "Hidden Codes" To Track Who Sees And Shares Your Photos](https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/07/14/facebook-is-embedding-hidden-codes-to-track-all-your-uploaded-photos-report/#c20ddd415925) - [Machine Identification Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code) - The presentation was made using the online tool `hackmd.io` --- ### Thank you for listen[](https://)ing Say hello at: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chr7stos/ - https://twitter.com/chr7stos