Products that we enjoy continue to create privacy, misinformation and workplace issues. We can do better at getting the industry to do better.
Via NYTimes, By Brian X. Chen
It has never felt worse to be a technology consumer. So what can you do about it?
That’s the question of the year after many of the biggest tech companies were mired in scandal after scandal or exposed as having committed necessary evils to offer the products and services that we have so blissfully enjoyed.
Those instant Amazon deliveries? They sure are convenient, but Amazon warehouse workers in Europe protested the company during Black Friday, describing their working conditions as inhuman.
You might have considered deleting Facebook after the social network confessed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the data of millions of users. If that didn’t convince you, maybe the security breach exposing the data of 30 million Facebook accounts did.
All of this bad behavior circles back to you. We are the buyers, users and supporters of the products and services that help Big Tech thrive.
So what do we do at this point to become more ethical consumers?
“I think this is an incredibly powerful question to ask,” said Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that focuses on technology’s impact on families. “It’s a very important moment where consumer behavior can have a transformational impact.”
I talked to a broad range of people — ethicists, activists, environmentalists and others — about how to become a more empowered, socially responsible tech consumer. Here’s what they agreed on.
Boycott and Shame
First and foremost, when tech does you wrong, one of the most powerful ways to protest is to take your business elsewhere and ask your friends and family to go along.
Last year, hundreds of thousands of customers abandoned Uber in favor of alternatives like Lyft after the ride-hailing company’s many scandals, including repeated accusations that it turned a blind eye to sexual harassment. That choice became a movement known as #DeleteUber. This year, people frustrated with Facebook took part in a #DeleteFacebook campaign.
The financial impact of these actions may not have been huge. Uber continues to grow (while still losing money) as it marches toward an initial public offering. Facebook has reported increased profits, though its user growth has slowed.
Even so, damage to a brand may have plenty of repercussions because it motivates the company to change its behavior, Mr. Steyer said. Both Uber and Facebook, facing enormous pressure, have modified some of their practices and committed to improvements.
“Sometimes shame is one of the most important arrows in your quiver,” Mr. Steyer said.
Give Up Convenience for Independence
We can also take the path less traveled — that is, take our data and money to products made by more ethical vendors.
Many people have hesitated to delete Facebook because doing so felt futile. Facebook is an all-in-one place for discovering local events, reading news, watching videos and staying connected to friends and family. The company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the largest photo-sharing and messaging services.
Pulling the plug on Facebook is a hassle, but not impossible. Taking on the challenge of finding alternatives is an example of how people can give up some convenience in exchange for individual empowerment, said Shahid Buttar, a director of grass-roots advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.
There is no direct replacement for something as convenient as Facebook. But if you go piecemeal, Mr. Buttar said, there are options. These include using an RSS reader, a software tool for getting a comprehensive feed of news sources that are self-curated; messaging people with a service like Signal, which is open-source software; and looking up events on organizing services like Meetup.
The same approach can be applied to Google if you take issue with its behavior. While Google offers a comprehensive suite of web services, including news, email and maps, you could switch to an alternative for each of those products.
A chief example: When ordering from Amazon or other online retailers, think twice before you opt for same-day or overnight delivery, even if it’s free. Other than the human toll of fast service, which has included miscarriages by pregnant workers at Verizon warehouses, there is an environmental impact.
A rush shipment could involve multiple vehicles and various facilities before it gets to your door. So pause and ask yourself if you actually need that smartphone or scented candle tomorrow. If you can wait, choose no-rush delivery, which could take about a week.
You can reduce your environmental impact further by delaying how often you upgrade technology. That can be achieved by regular maintenance of devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablets.
Vincent Lai, who works for the Fixers’ Collective, a social club in New York that repairs aging devices, said people could become more empowered by repairing, maintaining and modifying products to escape the upgrade cycle that tech companies impose.
When your smartphone seems to be slowing down, for instance, take steps to speed it back up by purging some photos and apps to clear storage, replacing an aging battery or reinstalling the operating system.
“One of the things you can do to be more responsible is to take greater ownership of your stuff,” Mr. Lai said.
Think About Your Friends
The Cambridge Analytica scandal this year illustrates our responsibility to think about others, not just ourselves, when using technology.
When Cambridge Analytica worked with a researcher who distributed a questionnaire app on Facebook to about 270,000 Americans, people who responded to the questions unwittingly shared data about their Facebook friends. As a result, the personal information of 87 million people was harvested to create voter profiles and to target political messages.
The sharing of friends’ data might have been prevented if Facebook users had been aware of their privacy settings. One now-defunct setting was called Apps Others Use, which controlled the information that your friends shared about you when they used apps, including your birthday or hometown.
In other words, if people had disabled Apps Others Use, Cambridge Analytica most likely couldn’t have collected the data of their friends. More important, if those who took the quiz were aware of the potential of sharing information about their friends, they might have opted not to participate.
But how can you be more conscious of your actions when technology is so confusing in the first place?
Education is key. Mr. Buttar said a network of 85 groups that make up the Electronic Frontier Foundation Alliance hosted workshops across the United States that taught people more about issues like digital privacy and data protection. And many online forums and publications track these issues closely.
The bottom line is that you are not alone. And if a company makes it too difficult for you and your friends to stay safe while staying connected, you can leave.
“If you’re really uncomfortable with the values of a company, don’t use their product,” Mr. Steyer said.
Read more about how to keep yourself safe and be less wasteful with technology.
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about solving tech-related problems.
This is a complicated situation that warrants intense scrutiny. Not only for the sanctions violations, but increasingly, the security issues. Technology is (about to be) everything in today’s world economies, political an social structures. In other words, everything about everything. Whether it’s this situation with China, or others with Russia, or the U.S., the way this cookie crumbles will foretell things to come. Do I have confidence this administration will get ahead of it, intelligently, responsibly, and make the right moves to protect what’s left to protect? Ask me something else.
It is one of China’s proudest corporate success stories, a colossus in cutting-edge technology that elbowed out Western rivals to become the biggest supplier of the hardware that connects our modern world.
Now, all around the globe, the walls are going up for Huawei.
The United States, which for years has considered the Chinese telecommunications giant a security threat, aimed a straight shot at the company’s leadership when it secured the arrest, in Canada, of Huawei’s chief financial officer.
But lately, Huawei’s setbacks have come on multiple fronts, from New Zealand and Australia to Britain and Canada. China sees the company as a pivotal driver of its ambitions for global technological leadership. Increasingly, much of the rest of the world sees it as a potential conduit for espionage and sabotage.
Huawei said Thursday that it was not aware of any wrongdoing by its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is a daughter of the company’s founder, and that it complied with the law wherever it operated. The company has long denied that it spies on behalf of Beijing.
For many years, the fog of distrust surrounding Huawei was a problem largely confined to the United States. Large American mobile carriers such as AT&T have avoided using Huawei’s equipment in their networks ever since a 2012 congressional report highlighted the security risks.
In response, Huawei focused its business efforts elsewhere. Its success in wealthy places such as Europe has helped it become the planet’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, as well as its No. 2 smartphone brand. Of the more than $90 billion in revenue it earned last year, more than a quarter came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Now, a wider patch of the world appears to be siding with Washington against Chinese technology. A turn en masse against the company, led by governments in many of its most important markets, would have grave implications for its business.
Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and a daughter of its founder, was arrested on Saturday in Canada at the request of the United States.
Australia barred Huawei this year from supplying technology for the country’s fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile networks. New Zealand last week blocked one of its leading mobile carriers from buying Huawei’s 5G gear. Britain’s intelligence chief, in a rare public appearance this week, said that the country had a difficult decision to make on whether to allow Huawei to build its 5G infrastructure.
And Canada’s top spy echoed those concerns, without naming Huawei or China, in a speech on Tuesday. Huawei has tested 5G equipment with major mobile carriers in both Canada and Britain.
Behind the tariff fight that has engulfed Washington and Beijing lies a deeper contest for leadership in future technologies such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence and 5G mobile internet. For many people in China, the contest feels not merely commercial, but civilizational. At stake is the country’s ability to claim its rightful place as a superpower.
“The Chinese government and Chinese companies must face these new circumstances, take up new countermeasures and get through this stage of crisis,” Fang Xingdong, the founder of ChinaLabs, a technology think tank in Beijing, said on Thursday. “This is a necessary rite of passage for China’s global technological rise.”
Huawei has tried to avoid being pulled into this fight. In an internal memo from January that was reviewed by The New York Times, Ren Zhengfei, the company’s founder, outlined a strategy for navigating these uncertain times.
The key, he wrote: Keep adapting. But do so quietly.
“Sometimes, it’s better to find a safe place and wait for stormy weather to pass,” Mr. Ren wrote.
Europe was one such place, Mr. Ren said. Huawei has cultivated political friendships and invested heavily in places like Britain. “Eventually, through years of effort, our goal is for Europeans to perceive Huawei as a European company,” Mr. Ren wrote.
Canada seemed to be another safe harbor. “The Canadian government is very sensible and open, giving us enormous confidence in our investments in this country,” Mr. Ren wrote.
This was all before Washington nearly put out of business Huawei’s main Chinese rival, ZTE.
In April, the Commerce Department barred ZTE from using components made in the United States after saying the company had failed to punish employees who violated American sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The move was effectively a death sentence because ZTE relied heavily on American microchips and other technology.
When the Commerce Department first announced its findings against ZTE in 2016, it released an internal ZTE document illustrating best practices for evading American sanctions.
In describing the approach, the document cited a company it nicknamed F7 as a model for how to pull it off. The description of F7 in the document matched Huawei.
A few months later, the Commerce Department subpoenaed Huawei and requested all information about its export or re-export of American technology to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, according to a copy of the subpoena seen by The Times.
The inquiry widened this year when the Treasury and Commerce Departments asked the Justice Department to investigate Huawei for possible sanctions violations. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York took on the case.
Eventually, the Trump administration decided to ease its punishment of ZTE, in an effort to cool tensions with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ahead of a historic North Korea meeting. But the power that Washington wielded over the fates of Chinese tech companies had been made very clear to people on both sides of the Pacific. In October, the Commerce Department imposed export controls on Fujian Jinhua, a state-backed semiconductor company that has been accused of stealing American chip designs.
Should Huawei be subjected to a ban on using American technology, the consequences would be significant, though perhaps not as life-threatening as they were for ZTE.
One crucial difference is that Huawei, unlike ZTE, does not depend extensively on outside vendors such as Qualcomm for the main chips in its smartphones. Around two-thirds of the handsets that Huawei sells contain chips made in-house, said Sean Kao, a hardware analyst at the research firm IDC.
Still, American firms supply other kinds of chips in Huawei’s gear as well as optical equipment for its fiber cable networks and other specialized parts.
“I don’t know exactly how many suppliers are affected,” said Stéphane Téral, senior research director at the data provider IHS Markit. But one thing is certain, he said: “They won’t be easily substitutable.”
The issue here, the answer, and the question, lies in demand. It is the end user, the consumers, who will dictate the success or failure of this potential reality of tech growth. If you look around, interview, or talk, to people, your friends, family, those in all age groups, and demographics, the clues to why this is happening, and perhaps, bound to get much worse, are evident. People. Buyers. They don’t care. They don’t see the threat. They don’t understand the threat. Not to extrapolate too much, but I am quite sure, that if we examine the age range, education, and the psychological profiles of these type of tech/appliance buyers, we will find answers, not only, for why this grim invasive tech reality is upon us, but also, why many other destructive societal, political, and environmental crises are headed our way.
More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.
No one really believed them, so few tried to stop them. Then before anyone realized it, the deed was done: Just about everyone had a Windows machine, and governments were left scrambling to figure out how to put Microsoft’s monopoly back in the bottle.
This sort of thing happens again and again in the tech industry. Audacious founders set their sights on something hilariously out of reach — Mark Zuckerberg wants to connect everyone — and the very unlikeliness of their plans insulates them from scrutiny. By the time the rest of us catch up to their effects on society, it’s often too late to do much about them.
It is happening again now. In recent years, the tech industry’s largest powers set their sights on a new target for digital conquest. They promised wild conveniences and unimaginable benefits to our health and happiness. There’s just one catch, which often goes unstated: If their novelties take off without any intervention or supervision from the government, we could be inviting a nightmarish set of security and privacy vulnerabilities into the world. And guess what. No one is really doing much to stop it.
The industry’s new goal? Not a computer on every desk nor a connection between every person, but something grander: a computer inside everything, connecting everyone.
Cars, door locks, contact lenses, clothes, toasters, refrigerators, industrial robots, fish tanks, sex toys, light bulbs, toothbrushes, motorcycle helmets — these and other everyday objects are all on the menu for getting “smart.” Hundreds of small start-ups are taking part in this trend — known by the marketing catchphrase “the internet of things” — but like everything else in tech, the movement is led by giants, among them Amazon, Apple and Samsung.
For instance, Amazon last month showed off a microwave powered by Alexa, its voice assistant. Amazon will sell the microwave for $60, but it is also selling the chip that gives the device its smarts to other manufacturers, making Alexa connectivity a just-add-water proposition for a wide variety of home appliances, like fans and toasters and coffee makers. And this week, both Facebook and Google unveiled their own home “hub” devices that let you watch videos and perform other digital tricks by voice.
You might dismiss many of these innovations as pretty goofy and doomed to failure. But everything big in tech starts out looking silly, and statistics show the internet of things is growing quickly. It is wiser, then, to imagine the worst — that the digitization of just about everything is not just possible but likely, and that now is the time to be freaking out about the dangers.
“I’m not pessimistic generally, but it’s really hard not to be,” said Bruce Schneier, a security consultant who explores the threats posed by the internet of things in a new book, “Click Here to Kill Everybody.”
Mr. Schneier argues that the economic and technical incentives of the internet-of-things industry do not align with security and privacy for society generally. Putting a computer in everything turns the whole world into a computer security threat — and the hacks and bugs uncovered in just the last few weeks at Facebook and Google illustrate how difficult digital security is even for the biggest tech companies. In a roboticized world, hacks would not just affect your data but could endanger your property, your life and even national security.
Mr. Schneier says only government intervention can save us from such emerging calamities. He calls for reimagining the regulatory regime surrounding digital security in the same way the federal government altered its national security apparatus after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among other ideas, he outlines the need for a new federal agency, the National Cyber Office, which he imagines researching, advising and coordinating a response to threats posed by an everything-internet.
“I can think of no industry in the past 100 years that has improved its safety and security without being compelled to do so by government,” he wrote. But he conceded that government intervention seems unlikely at best. “In our government-can’t-do-anything-ever society, I don’t see any reining in of the corporate trends,” he said.
Those trends are now obvious. It used to be difficult to add internet connectivity to home devices, but in the last few years the cost and complexity of doing so have plummeted. Today, off-the-shelf minicomputers like the Arduino can be used to turn just about any household object “smart.” Systems like the one Amazon is offering promise to accelerate the development of internet-of-things devices even further.
At a press event last month, an Amazon engineer showed how easily a maker of household fans could create a “smart” fan using Amazon’s chip, known as the Alexa Connect Kit. The kit, which Amazon is testing with some manufacturers, would simply be plugged into the fan’s control unit during assembly. The manufacturer also has to write a few lines of code — in the example of the fan, the Amazon engineer needed just a half-page of code.
And that’s it. The fan’s digital bits (including security and cloud storage) are all handled by Amazon. If you buy it from Amazon, the fan will automatically connect with your home network and start obeying commands issued to your Alexa. Just plug it in.
This system illustrates Mr. Schneier’s larger argument, which is that the cost of adding computers to objects will get so small that it will make sense for manufacturers to connect every type of device to the internet.
Sometimes, smarts will lead to conveniences — you can yell at your microwave to reheat your lunch from across the room. Sometimes it will lead to revenue opportunities — Amazon’s microwave will reorder popcorn for you when you’re running low. Sometimes smarts are used for surveillance and marketing, like the crop of smart TVs that track what you watch for serving up ads.
Even if the benefits are tiny, they create a certain market logic; at some point not long from now, devices that don’t connect to the internet will be rarer than ones that do.
The trouble, though, is that business models for these devices don’t often allow for the kind of continuing security maintenance that we are used to with more traditional computing devices. Apple has an incentive to keep writing security updates to keep your iPhone secure; it does so because iPhones sell for a lot of money, and Apple’s brand depends on keeping you safe from digital terrors.
But manufacturers of low-margin home appliances have little such expertise, and less incentive. That’s why the internet of things has so far been synonymous with terrible security — why the F.B.I. had to warn parents last year about the dangers of “smart toys,” and why Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, has identified smart devices as a growing threat to national security.
An Amazon representative told me that the company was building security into the core of its smart technologies. The Connect Kit, the company said, lets Amazon maintain the digital security of a smart device — and Amazon is very likely to be better at security than many manufacturers of household appliances. As part of its cloud business, the company also offers a service for companies to audit the security of their internet-of-things services.
The Internet of Things Consortium, an industry group that represents dozens of companies, did not respond to an inquiry.
Mr. Schneier is painting government intervention not as a panacea but as a speed bump, a way for us humans to catch up to the technological advances. Regulation and government oversight slow down innovation — that’s one reason techies don’t like it. But when uncertain global dangers are involved, taking a minute isn’t a terrible idea.
Connecting everything could bring vast benefits to society. But the menace could be just as vast. Why not go slowly into the uncertain future?
What the world needs now? Handwritten cards and letters.
No other written method of communication shows you care as much about connecting personally, than pen, ink, and, when called for, a stamp. It asks for more of us, more time, more creativity, and more commitment. That’s a good thing. Whether we realize it or not. Sadly, it appears that most people don’t realize it, haven’t been taught it, or, have long forgotten it.
Besides fame and success, what do all of these people have in common?
Something surprisingly unglamorous and gloriously analog: a love of physical cards and letters. Of notes that need a lick and a stamp instead of a click and a swoosh.
Over the past decade, the number of first-class mail items sent through the Postal Service has dropped by more than 50 percent. Not counting holiday cards and invitations, the average American household receives just 10 pieces of personal mail per year. Nearly half of British children, according to one survey, have never sent a handwritten letter.
In an age of torrential email, incessant group texts and lackadaisical Facebook birthday posts, snail mail has become quaint, almost vintage. But that doesn’t mean its days are over. As a recent CityLab story pointed out, we can save snail mail — if we want to.
David Sedaris, the best-selling author and humorist, is known for writing letters to his fans, his boyfriend and everyone he works with on book tours. He will also send a thank-you note if you have him over for dinner.
“I just feel like it’s classy to do it with real mail,” he said. “It’s too easy to do it on email. And it also doesn’t mean as much.” Not to mention, he added, “It’s nice to be thought of as classy.”
Whether it’s to say thank you, hi or I’m sorry — or to send a Q-tip attached to a sheet of paper, as Mr. Sedaris’s pen pal, the late comedian Phyllis Diller, once did — here’s why it’s time to bring snail mail back.
Writing by hand feels good.
When we write by hand, we retain information better and may even boost our creativity. Plus, because we do it so rarely these days, it can be a welcome respite from typing.
“It’s more fun,” said Margaret Shepherd, a professional calligrapher and author of “The Art of the Handwritten Note.” “It is such a delight to see that ink go on that beautiful paper — to pick out a stamp, to slow down and realize you thanked or consoled somebody in the best way possible.”
The warm fuzzies that accompany writing are more than anecdotal. In one study, Steven Toepfer, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Kent State University at Salem, asked participants to compose three “letters of gratitude” over the span of a month.
They could write to anyone, as long as the content was positive. With each letter, the writers experienced higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and lower levels of depressive symptoms.
Mr. Toepfer said we all have a base of gratitude inside us, which can lead to positive psychological effects. “But we have to tap into it — and use it — to get its benefits,” he explained. “I think writing letters does that.”
Handwritten notes spread love.
If you want to show you care, snail mail is an effective method. Think about the last time you received a hand-addressed missive — didn’t it make you smile?
Saeideh Heshmati, assistant professor of positive psychology at Claremont Graduate University, recently researched what makes people “feel loved.” She found that “small gestures in everyday life,” like people supporting you without expecting anything back or showing compassion during tough times, were what participants most agreed upon as “loving.”
Since cards require more effort than email, Ms. Heshmati said recipients will likely “feel more loved because you took the time to do that for them.” She added, “It’s the care that comes with it that signals the love.”
Snail mail is, well, slow (and unique).
Whereas emails are something to rush through on the way to Inbox Zero, cards and letters are something to cherish; to set on a desk, to stick to a fridge, to bind into a book for future generations.
In the digital age, we are “assaulted by a barrage of information — much of it having little or no importance,” Florence Isaacs wrote in her book “Just a Note to Say.” “Yet personal words on paper often are saved in a shoe box, becoming a memory to be revisited through the years.”
For proof, look to Letters of Note, a popular site that offers an intimate window into history and the characters who shaped it. While there may someday be an “Emails of Note,” it wouldn’t impart the same romance. After all, the swirl of the letters, the smudges of ink and the pastiche of paper are what brings us into each writer’s world.
You don’t have to be a writer or an artist to send meaningful notes.
Because of snail mail’s novelty, what you say — and what it looks like — often matters less than the act itself.
“My husband sends handwritten notes scratched out with a pencil, and people just sit up and sing,” said Ms. Shepherd, the calligrapher. “They’re so happy to get something in the mail, even if it doesn’t have a lot of production value.”
If you find yourself struggling to find the appropriate words, she recommended keeping it simple and writing as though you are talking to your recipient. If you don’t know who to write, start with the children in your life or reach out to deserving strangers through initiatives like More Love Letters or Operation Gratitude.
When one of Mr. Sedaris’s friends comes out with a new book or play, he sends a card with specific details like: “I loved it on Page 38 when you did this.”
“I just realize how much it means when somebody goes into details,” he said. “I know it makes me feel good, and it’s not that hard. … A little effort is all it takes.”
Getting started is easier than you think.
Mr. Sedaris is right: Although snail mail requires more work than its digital kin, it’s still not hard.
Avoid the agony of scouring last-minute, overpriced $5 cards in the drugstore by purchasing a set of blank cards to keep at home. Craft fairs and farmers’ markets usually have lovely handmade ones, and even the dollar store sells passable sets. If you have a favorite artist or illustrator, they may have an Etsy or Gumroad shop where you can buy their work printed on blank cards.
Then grab a book of stamps and a nice pen and toss it all into a shoe box. Now you’re ready for snail mail — with minimal hassle. (You can even batch cards at the beginning of each month by scanning your calendar for upcoming birthdays and celebrations.)
The next time you’re tempted to send a congratulatory email or a digital birthday message, try a card instead. If you’re looking for an event to kick you off, consider making this holiday season the one where you offer friends a chance to get on a holiday card list — no strings or reciprocation attached (if that’s O.K. with you) — and send a personal note to each loved one who signs up.
“There’s something permanently charming about getting an envelope in the mail,” said Ms. Shepherd. “It’s as if somebody gift wrapped their words for you.”
Laura Nolan, a software engineer in Ireland, left Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense.
Really important! This is exactly how to truly evaluate a company’s real values, if not, their moral position towards development technologies.
By Kate Conger and Cade Metz, NYTimes Oct. 7, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, recently became alarmed by reports that the company was developing a search engine for China that would censor content on behalf of the government.
While Dr. Poulson works on search technologies, he had no knowledge of the product, which was code-named Dragonfly. So in a meeting last month with Jeff Dean, the company’s head of artificial intelligence, Dr. Poulson asked if Google planned to move ahead with the product and if his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance in China.
According to Dr. Poulson, Mr. Dean said that Google complied with surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if the company should leave the United States market in protest. Mr. Dean also shared a draft of a company email that read, “We won’t and shouldn’t provide 100 percent transparency to every Googler, to respect our commitments to customer confidentiality and giving our product teams the freedom to innovate.”
The next day, Dr. Poulson quit the company. Mr. Dean did not respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to comment.
Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration’s policies and the larger role of technology in government.
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes.
All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.
Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, quit the company when he found out his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance
And the change is likely to last: Some engineering students have said they are demanding more answers and are asking similar questions, even before they move into the work force.
“What people are looking for — not just employees — they are looking for some clarity,” said Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman. “Are there principles that get applied? Even if you don’t agree with the decision that gets made, if you understand the thinking behind it, it helps a lot.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
The lack of information about what tech employees are working on was recently evident at Clarifai, an artificial intelligence start-up in New York City.
Last year, a small team of Clarifai engineers began working on a project inside a private room at its downtown New York office, said three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified for fear of retaliation. Paper covered the windows, and employees called the room “The Chamber of Secrets,” in a sly reference to the second Harry Potter novel. Even the eight engineers and researchers working inside the room did not entirely realize the nature of the project, the people said.
When employees asked about the project in meetings, Clarifai’s chief executive, Matt Zeiler, said it was a government project related to “analytics” or “surveillance” and would “save lives,” according to the people.
After employees read documents posted to Clarifai’s internal systems, it became clear that the company had won a contract for Project Maven and that workers were creating something for the Defense Department, the people said. One engineer quit the project immediately after a meeting with the Defense Department where killing was discussed in frank terms, they said.
A Clarifai spokesman said that at the very beginning of the project, the company sat down with those chosen for it to brief them on the nature of the work, and one employee quit the project then. “Every member of Clarifai’s Project Maven team agreed to work on the project, and the two people who chose not to participate were assigned to different efforts across the company,” the spokesman said.
Dr. Poulson, whose work involved incorporating a variety of languages into Google search, said he did not initially think his research could be involved in Dragonfly — until he noticed Chinese had been added to a list of languages for his project.
“Most people don’t know the holistic scope of what they’re building,” said Dr. Poulson, 32, who worked at Google for over two years. “You don’t have knowledge of where it’s going unless you’re sufficiently senior.”
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” Ms. Nolan said.
The difficulties of knowing what companies are doing with technologies is compounded because engineers at large tech companies often build infrastructure — like algorithms, databases and even hardware — that underpins almost every product a company offers. At Google, for example, a storage system called Colossus is used by Google search, Google Maps and Gmail.
“It would be very difficult for most engineers in Google to be sure that their work wouldn’t contribute to these projects in some way,” said Ms. Nolan, who helped to keep Google’s systems running online smoothly. “My personal feeling was that if the organization is doing something I find ethically unacceptable, then I was contributing to it.”
Yet executives at tech companies have claimed that complete transparency is not possible.
“We’ve always had confidential projects as a company. I think what happened when the company was smaller, you had a higher chance of knowing about it,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said at a staff meeting in August, according to a transcript provided to The New York Times. “I think there are a lot of times when people are in exploratory stages where teams are debating and doing things, so sometimes being fully transparent at that stage can cause issues.”
Such policies have rippled beyond tech companies. In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.)
“We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to be complicit in this gross misuse of power.”
Alex Ahmed, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, said she organized a student discussion on campus this month to debate whether they should work for tech companies that made decisions they believed to be unethical.
“We’re not given an ethics course. We’re not given a political education,” Ms. Ahmed, 29, said. “It’s impossible for us to do this unless we create the conversations for ourselves.”
Over the summer, she said, students at Northeastern also protested the school’s multimillion-dollar research contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under which it would provide research on technology exports to the agency. A Northeastern spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Bridget Frey, the chief technology officer at the online real estate company Redfin, said job candidates had increasingly raised ethical questions in interviews. This summer, interns questioned Redfin’s chief executive, Glenn Kelman, about whether the way the site displays school information and test scores could contribute to socio-economic divides in neighborhoods. In response, the company said it planned to add more context about the test score information early next year.Employees are now frequently asking, “If you don’t share the information with me, how can I make sure this isn’t happening here?” Ms. Frey said.
Definitive, preventative action from responsible parties, should not be postponed because there is not a direct connections proven. Open eyes see the way teens, already behave – necks bent, preoccupied checking their phones, bizarrely concerned with every post on social media, or checking their scores from online gaming.
Most teens today own a smartphone and go online every day, and about a quarter of them use the internet “almost constantly,” according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center.
Now a study published Tuesday in JAMA suggests that such frequent use of digital media by adolescents might increase their odds of developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“It’s one of the first studies to look at modern digital media and ADHD risk,” says psychologist Adam Leventhal, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and an author of the study.
When considered with previous research showing that greater social media use is associated with depression in teens, the new study suggests that “excessive digital media use doesn’t seem to be great for [their] mental health,” he adds.
Previous research has shown that watching television or playing video games on a console put teenagers at a slightly higher risk of developing ADHD behaviors. But less is known about the impact of computers, tablets and smartphones.
Because these tools have evolved very rapidly, there’s been little research into the impact of these new technologies on us, says Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan, who wrote an editorial about the new study for JAMA.
Each new platform reaches millions of people worldwide in a matter of days or weeks, she says. “Angry Birds reached 50 million users within 35 days. Pokémon Go reached the same number in 19 days.”
Research into their effects hasn’t been able to keep pace with the technological evolution, she adds.
“So it’s nice to finally to have some evidence on longer term impact that [these technologies are] having on children,” says Radesky.”I think it shows that something is going on, that there is an association, even if small, between these type[s] of media use habits throughout the day with emerging inattention, trouble with focusing, resisting distraction, controlling your impulses.”
The study followed 2,587 10th graders in schools in Los Angeles county over two years. The teens showed no symptoms of ADHD at the beginning of the study. By the end, teens with more frequent digital media use were more likely to have symptoms of ADHD.
The researchers assessed the students using a standardized questionnaire for ADHD symptoms, including nine symptoms each for inattention and hyperactivity. Students with six or more symptoms in either category were counted as having symptoms of the disorder, based on criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders.
During the two years of the study, the researchers surveyed the teens every six months and asked them about the frequency of their participation in 14 different kinds of online activities such as texting, sharing on social media and streaming videos or music.
About half of the students said they check social media sites and text many times every day.
“These results show that teens are really attached to their [digital] technologies, throughout the day,” says Radesky, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “It really captured the pervasive design that so many of these mobile technologies have taken on.”
By and large, students who frequently used six or more activities had a higher likelihood of developing ADHD symptoms.
For instance, among the 51 students who frequently did all 14 online activities, 10.5 percent showed ADHD symptoms over the course of the study. And of the 114 teens who frequently did seven digital activities, 9.5 showed symptoms. In contrast, only 4.6 percent of the 495 kids who didn’t do any of the activities frequently had new ADHD symptoms over the two-year period.
In other words, teens who were high frequency users of seven or 14 digital media platforms were more than twice as likely to develop ADHD symptoms than teens who did not use any media platform at a high frequency rate, notes Leventhal.
He and his colleagues statistically controlled for other potential confounding factors like family income level, race/ethnicity and pre-existing mental health conditions.Leventhal is quick to caution that his study does not prove that being plugged into their devices caused ADHD among teens. “We don’t know that,” he says.
Showing ADHD symptoms is not the same as ADHD diagnosis,which is a multi-step process that involves a clinician in addition to the questionnaire. The study did not diagnose any of the kids with ADHD.
The study doesn’t prove causation — it finds an association. Still, because the study involved students who did not show symptoms in the beginning, the results give some cause for concern, Leventhal says. “To have 10-ish percent [of the high frequency media users] have the occurrence of new symptoms is fairly high,” he says.
Starting the study with kids who did not have ADHD at baseline was “a smart choice.” notes Radesky. “It helps reduce the chicken and egg situation.”
One of the strengths of the study is that it included a large number of teens from a diverse backgrounds, because “sociodemographic diversity has been a limitation of prior studies on digital media,” she writes in the JAMA editorial.
While the study doesn’t show that all children are at risk of developing problems with attention and hyperactivity, “there is probably a sub-sample of kids who are more vulnerable,” notes Radesky.
For example, the study found that children with mental health problems were more likely to develop these symptoms.
“That’s important because those are the kids who are doing their emotional expression online,” says Radesky. “They might be getting into more drama online, getting into more cyber bullying. And that can definitely be dysregulating and affect your ability to focus on things.”
However, the study did have some limitations, she notes.
“There are other things changing over time that might explain the results you’re seeing,” she says. “In this case, they did not collect data on teenagers’ sleep. They didn’t have information on what the family dynamics were like at home, you know how involved were the parents? … How much media is being used at home by the parents?”
Previous studies have shown that social media use is associated with disturbed sleep, which could itself affect children’s ability to focus in school and that might manifest in ADHD-like symptoms.
Similarly, “the more parents are on their phone, the more teens are likely to be as well,” adds Radesky.
Radesky, who co-wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics’ media use guidelines, says that she recommends parents and their children pause and reflect on how they use media, so children can understand the benefits and pitfalls of their online habits.
“I’d really like teenagers to develop a sense of tech savviness … so they don’t all feel this pressure to be online constantly in order to feel social relevance or acceptance,” she says.
