In this follow-up to "Embedded Ethics: Pandemic Contact Tracing and Ethical Trade-Offs" [6], students revisit a trade-off they faced in that first module. There, students brain-stormed about the rich data one might collect to build a powerful app for contact tracing, discovered that this may facilitate violations of privacy, considered the harms that can come from this, and recognized the trade-off between protecting privacy and gathering data to support the fight against the spread of a disease such as COVID-19.
This second module comprises pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities. In the technical portion of the module, students learn that seeming solutions like anonymization won't solve privacy concerns. Through a collaborative active-learning exercise, they discover that a policy of limited collection more effectively protects data privacy: if location and private health information are not collected, they cannot be leaked. However, increased privacy comes at the cost of lowered public health protections. In the Philosophy portion of this module, students return to the stakeholders they met in the first module, with a different ethical goal in mind: justifying a design decision to a stakeholder who would have preferred a different ethical trade-off. They practise this through a second collaborative activity and a short, written, homework exercise. All the elements of this module, and the materials that support them, are described in Section 6.
Together these two modules demonstrate how technical design decisions can be ethically informed. After completing these embedded ethics modules, students will be better prepared to recognize and discuss ethical issues, and take them into account in their design decisions---skills that will be increasingly important to their careers.
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- 2023. University of Toronto Embedded Ethics Module Repository. (2023). Retrieved 2023-11-10 from https://www.cs.toronto.edu/embedded-ethics/Google Scholar
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- Diane Horton, David Liu, Sheila A. McIlraith, and Nina Wang. 2023. Is More Better When Embedding Ethics in CS Courses?. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 652--658. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Diane Horton, Sheila A. McIlraith, Nina Wang, Maryam Majedi, Emma McClure, and Benjamin Wald. 2022. Embedding Ethics in Computer Science Courses: Does It Work?. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1 (SIGCSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 481--487. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maryam Majedi, Emma McClure, Benjamin Wald, Diane Horton, and Sheila McIlraith. 2023. Embedded Ethics: Pandemic Contact Tracing and Ethical Trade-Offs. In ACM EngageCSEdu. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. Google ScholarCross Ref
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