I think we can agree that building quality CRUD apps has become much more straightforward in the last several years (which could explain the improved quality of grading apps), but there are many ethical questions around data collection, user-engagement, etc. that extend far beyond basic tooling that existed 20 years ago.
This feels like an extension of the overarching debate around social media in general, which Tristan Harris also criticizes regularly.
First off, by not letting myself get dragged into bad behavior when provoked, which is hard, when it comes to talking about controversial topics, but primarily by focusing on single topic groups that keep a tight rein on topics of discussion... in other words, rules like "No politics or religion, etc." or "We are here because we like "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and not to hate on J.J. Abrams", etc.
Even fandom-based groups can be ugly, but by looking for groups where the focus is on the positive rather than the negative, great discussion and even debate can be had without having things degenerate to YouTube comments level. Some of these groups will even have an "entrance exam" asking you a trivia question or for your opinion on the topic so that you must demonstrate you actually know something about what the group discusses, and aren't just there to throw grenades.
I think this is the way people can make good use of the fact that "everyone" is on Facebook. It allows you to create your own little clubhouse, and as with real clubs, some are good and some are bad, but you can look for the good ones and leave the bad ones behind.
tl;dr On Facebook, private groups can be very beneficial.
Do the same issues exist in these platforms?
Although I agree it should be, how does one engineer things such that an ethical but less profitable software provider has the leverage to beat less ethical but more profitable providers at selling their products/services?
It's unclear to me whether confidential communication respecting students using Google products meets our legal obligations, given that I'm in Canada and (as far as I know) Google doesn't have any data centers physically located in Canada...
You can choose to believe that or not, but that's the rub.
The student has no choice (and no chance at privacy), because the decision was made for them by a school administrator who was excited about getting $100 laptops in bulk.
It's hard to imagine a more exciting situation to be in if you're Google or Microsoft: You have guaranteed customers who literally are required to buy their products. They're forced to buy in, year after year. And the further the buy-in, the further a school system has invested into Google or Microsoft's education platform, the less ability they have to pivot, since the devices they bought are locked to those platforms, the software they're using is running on those platforms' cloud servers, their curriculum is tied to those platforms, etc.
I think the pox here we need to deal with is vertical integration. We need to put an end to the concept of a single company selling you hardware, providing the software, and locking you in on services.
A fun similar racket is body cams: Taser will give a police department free body cams for every officer, so, you know, nobody has an excuse not to have body cams, as far as the public sees. But those body cams only work with their cloud service (which isn't free), and thanks to the handy fact that evidence has to be retained for many years, Taser can effectively make it impossible to stop subscribing once a department signs up.
[1]The school may or may not purchase it for your student, but you paid for it in your taxes anyways.
Unless your community has explicitly passed bonds earmarked for school district tech purchases, you’re not paying extra taxes for this. The district is making the decision to use existing funds for tech purchases rather than spending that money on something else. If you don’t agree with this allocation of funds, you are more than welcome to attend a school board meeting to voice your opinion.
TL;DR:
Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?
Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important.
Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line.
Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts.
Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously.
Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want.
Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times.
Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.
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[1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...
This is huge in mobile apps. Loot creates, "packs", etc. which means every end result doesn't have a fixed cost, but an "Expected" cost. I.e. if you want a certain item, you don't know how many times you have to buy a $3 pack to get it. You know you would pay $15 for it, though. So you start pulling that lever, hoping you'll get it. It's gambling, essentially. Literally a slot machines where you put $3 in, pull a lever, and maybe you get nothing good, something okay, or something great.
Take social media. I know so many people in business and media who did perfectly fine before it. Now that it's table stakes, we all have to waste time on it. Great for Twitter and FB, but just a cost for the rest of us.
Or youtube and the porn sites. If they infringe, what are you going to do about it? They take it down, someone else re-uploads--a full-time job to keep it off, and they're purely on the honor system when it comes to royalties. It's not like you can sic your auditors on Google's server room.
Or ed-tech. So many school districts spending millions on VMs and tablets for every child, yet the academic performance is as mediocre as ever.
And it's like people have no concept of just how dangerous information is--like cracking the enigma machine in WWII. Google is probably sitting on enough info to ruin most of our politicians. What if they were inclined to action?
What if you need to build maps for all the world? What if you want to go to Mars? What if you want to build a payment system?
Small actors could not do that.
We are rolling the dice toward a level of social control unparalleled in human history, and we are doing this for marginal gains to a standard-of-living which is already quite high.
And it only takes one catastrophe to get that bad turn of government--even in a "democracy." It only took a few bombs for us to throw the Japanese into camps when that was clearly unconstitutional.
Edit: I realize it’s an unpopular question here, but other than it being cool - why do we need a Mars colony?
