Comment on Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 3 days agoThis issue with asserting that technology is neutral is it lets the people who develop it ignore the impacts of their work.
I don’t see how that is the case. The tech is neutral, but the engineers know what the application they are hired for is. That is determined by people and subject to morality.
Would you say openCV or the people working on it are evil? I wouldn’t. I would say that once someone takes that project for flock is evil.
I think this framing is more important when talking with the general public as they are likely to walk away thinking that its the tech that creates problems and not the for profit corporations who will be free to continue doing the same, so long as they don’t use that tech.
JollyG@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It is literally the case. People who have literally made tools to do bad things justified it by claiming that tech is neutral in an abstract sense. Find an engineer who is building a tool to do something they think is bad, they will tell you that bromide.
OpenCV is not, in itself, immoral. But openCV is, once again, actual tech that exists in the actual world. In fact, that is how I know it is not bad, I use the context of reality—rather than hypotheticals or abstractions—to assess the morality of the tech. The tech stack that makes up Flock is bad, once again I make that determination by using the actual world as a reference point. It does not matter that some of the tech could be used to do good. In the case of Flock, it is not, so it’s bad.
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Bold a keyword there for you
JollyG@lemmy.world 3 days ago
At no point in this conversation have I ever said that tech in an abstract sense is inherently good or bad. The point that I am making— and this is the last time I will make it— is that it is not interesting to talk about the ethics of some technology in an abstraction in cases where the actual tech is as it is actually implemented is clearly bad.
Saying “tech is neutral” is a dodge. People say that to avoid thinking about the ethics of what it is they are doing.
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 3 days ago
But that is what you are doing and I am saying that it is people who are responsible for the implementation.