She offers a way for us to learn to do so through introducing a concept called ethical debt, which pairs nicely with the well-established notion of technical debt — the implied cost to rewrite poorly written code. Ethical and technical debt get built up when technology creators take shortcuts, ethical or technical, in the creation of their apps.
As Fiesler says in her video, “The problem with debt is that it has to be paid back with interest.” The issue of Zoombombing, for example, would have been largely mitigated if early discussions about its possibility caused the developers of Zoom to have calls password-protected by default.
In order to avoid generating ethical debt, Fiesler suggests the practice of creating what we refer to in our class as problematic user personas: taking the time when your app is still just an idea on paper to envision the types of people that might want to misuse your app for harm and the ways they might do so.
In my app development class, we put Fiesler’s suggestion to direct use right at the start of the term. One of the first projects my students create is a business card generator, an app in which users submit some personal information in order to have a business card designed for them. At least, that’s how most users might use this app, but after watching Fiesler’s video students were also charged with brainstorming who else might have a use for their app. What about some user stalking a previous romantic partner, or someone looking to collect the personal data of others for blackmail? Students were tasked with, as Fiesler requests of us, “thinking about the risks, the misuse, during the design process”.
When my students get out into the workforce, potentially as creators of technology in the future, I want them to not only want to build more responsibly, but to know how to do so. And students want this too. One student reflected recently, “I think [these practices] add significantly to the class curriculum. I find that once charged with the ethical side of the equation, my design becomes much more deliberate as to how it will be affecting a user.” I couldn’t agree more.
