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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."
In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.
He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.
By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)
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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 22 2016, @09:28PM
"I was just following orders"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @02:39AM
You must mean Befehl ist Befehl [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:37AM
Said in unison every morning at Google and Facebook and _insert-USAian_big_data_corporation_. The new Pledge of Allegiance, just like in Grade 1.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Monday November 28 2016, @07:57PM
ok, i take your point, but you tell me: so YOU take it upon yourself to not only know the clients you work for (perhaps many degrees of separation away such that you may not even know who the client is), and their stances on all the social issues which concern you ? and your company doesnt have a problem with you sending said clients a list of ethical litmus tests they must pass to your satisfaction ?
no ?
then you are a ho just like the rest of us ? ? ?
if you ain't pimpin', then you is ho'in...