Software Engineers Are the New Doctors
28 Nov 2017What Is Ethical Software Engineering?
Ethical software engineering requires a lot of effort on the part of software engineers. It requires them to constantly think about what they are doing and about the broader implications of their actions. Some may assert that ethical actions are simply ones that benefit, or at the very least, do not harm others. However, harm is subjective. What one software engineer considers to be harmless may not sit well with another. In that sense, there is no fixed set of ethical rules in software engineering. Rather, ethics in software engineering consists of the perceived principles and norms that the collective body of software engineers in the world expect other software engineers to follow. It is fluid because people enter and exit the field all the time and their view of what constitutes an ethical action is influenced by societal ethical norms, which are also fluid.
The Serial Swatter
In the case of the Serial Swatter, it should be clear that what Obnoxious did was unethical and harmful. Sending a SWAT team to someone’s home is dangerous and traumatic. It should also be clear that Twitch did not do enough to prevent harm to the female streamers. It should have recognized from the start that people can and will do anything online, when their anonymity is almost guaranteed. Online harassment is obviously a major issue, and since online lives are often intricately linked with real ones, online harassment can translate into physical harassment. This is difficult to prevent when people are putting more and more of their information on the web. This simply means that data security and privacy are more important than ever, and that the ethics of software engineers who are entrusted with the task of safeguarding that information become absolutely critical. They could be compared to our doctors, who we must entrust our lives to whether we like it or not.
Who’s to Blame?
The blame rests on more parties than Twitch. A chain of events allowed the swatting incidents to occur and it is possible that a single event could have put a stop to the whole chain. Also, the problem lies not so much on the ethics of the parties involved as it does on their security practices. Twitch itself could certainly have algorithms and teams in place to detect and ban offenders, as well as to help victims of harassment. Companies like Amazon, which are entrusted with the personal information of their customers, could certainly have much stricter security policies in place to prevent social engineering attacks. The police could have invested in technologies which would allow it to analyze calls and distinguish between genuine and fake ones. It could have demilitarized its forces as well. The female streamers themselves could have helped with the situation by realizing that there should not be an expectation of privacy on the internet. They should use VPNs and refrain from posting personally identifiable information, making them much harder to track down.