Ethics in Tech with Eva Galperin and Alan Rozenshtein

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.

Eva Galperin is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director of Cybersecurity. Prior to 2007, when she came to work for EFF, Eva worked in security and IT in Silicon Valley and earned degrees in Political Science and International Relations from SFSU. Her work is primarily focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable populations around the world. To that end, she has applied the combination of her political science and technical background to everything from organizing EFF’s Tor Relay Challenge, to writing privacy and security training materials (including Surveillance Self Defense and the Digital First Aid Kit), and publishing research on malware in Syria, Vietnam, Kazakhstan. When she is not collecting new and exotic malware, she practices aerial circus arts and learning new languages.
Alan Rozenshtein is an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, a senior editor at Lawfare, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.