In federal court, Seattle School District #1 is suing big tech companies under Washington state’s public nuisance law, alleging social media harms children’s mental health. Also, as a result of consolidating 100 cases, a large multi-district lawsuit in federal court in California is using products liability to take aim at big tech for harming children’s…
There was an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter that aired in 1976. Juan Epstein, a character in Kotter’s infamous classroom of remedial students called the Sweathogs, decides he wants to become a veterinarian. His teacher, Gabe Kotter, supports his dream and encourages him to speak to a career counselor at the school. Enter technology. The…
People put a lot of stock in data. Data is essentially information. It often becomes the basis for an assumption. When we think of data, we think of facts. That works in many settings. For example, an ingredient label, done truthfully, lists ingredients. If it lists flour, one would reasonably assume the product contains flour….
In criminal law, the mens rea is the criminal intent. It is a mindset – most crimes require both an act and a mindset. Often mens rea is what distinguishes guilt from innocence even among people who have committed the same act. For example, pushing a shopping cart of bagged groceries out of a store…
I don’t think so, but I do wonder whether the coins or tokens that yield healthcare access or access to items and services conducive to health can develop robust trading markets, increasing their value, and become a universal tool for accessing health care and improving health. As with an NFT, token, or coin, demand drives…
Neuro-rights may protect people from certain harms due to neurotech advances. Neurotech has potential to improve medical treatments and revolutionize care, but there are foreseeable risks. Marcello Ienca defines neuro-rights “as the ethical, legal, social, or natural principles of freedom or entitlement related to a person’s cerebral and mental domain; that is, the fundamental normative…
When we look at privacy, many goals converge. I separate constitutional privacy and protection from government surveillance from personal confidentiality. Having explored whether one can survive without the other, I remain uncertain. But I am certain that a balance of values would lead to more fairness and that confidentiality is not the only important ethical…
Hackable Part 4 A hyper-focus on informed consent as the primary tool to ensure autonomy represents some lapses in the field of bioethics. To me, informed consent is more valuable in traditional clinical care or medical research than in engagement with big data. Yet consent is the operational tool behind widespread data collection and the…
(Part 3 of series) Children and young adults spend significant time online using apps that collect massive amounts of information, but they may lack digital literacy. Schools also collect much more information than they used to. The voluntarily divulged information in an online profile plus any hackable identifiable data make children vulnerable to future and…
Voluntariness at the time one provides data is an important, overlooked part of providing informed consent. In medicine, informed consent requires voluntariness, yet the on-the-ground experience may reveal pressures to comply. The new landscape of responsible technology, while it incorporates certain types of consent like clicking to accept cookies, needs more definition and clarity around…
