Ethics in Tech with Cory Doctorow and Sarah Roberts

From the moment you wake up and check your messages on Facebook or Twitter, to when you set your Google Nest for the night, tech giants wield unprecedented influence over our daily lives. With this enormous power comes an enormous potential for abuse. The information economy has led to profound challenges to personal privacy. Stalkerware takes advantage of security gaps in our personal digital infrastructure to turn phones and smart home products into tools for facilitating domestic violence. Online platforms are grappling with what it means to provide fairness and due process to their users. And across the tech industry, racial and gender-based discrimination scandals suggest a need to address toxic cultures. The question of how to impose ethical guardrails on these enormously powerful actors is among the most important challenges of this generation.

This series, which has been developed as a collaborative project between the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy and the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, features conversations with leading voices in the fight for responsible conduct in the tech sector.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the editor of Pluralistic and the author of young adult novels like LITTLE BROTHER and HOMELAND and novels for adults like ATTACK SURFACE and WALKAWAY, as well as nonfiction books like HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Sarah T. Roberts is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Information Studies and holds an appointment in Labor Studies. She is a co-founder of both the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the Minderoo Initiative on Technology and Power, and she was recently appointed a Research Associate to the Oxford Internet Institute as well as invited to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cyber Policy (at Chatham House). She is a 2018 Carnegie Fellow and a 2018 recipient of the EFF Barlow Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on content moderation of social media.