Kathy Pham
Product, Society, and Ethics
Video URL: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-society-and-ethics-by-kathy-pham/
Discussion: Issue #3
In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Kathy Pham reflects on the importance of asking societal and ethical questions in product organizations and asks how teams and companies can be more accountable in the future.
Kathy, who is a Fellow at Mozilla, Harvard, and MIT with over 15 years’ tech experience in product, engineering, data and leadership, asserts that product and ethics are increasingly important in a progressive society – the stakes are rising.
She ascribes a lack of accountability for unethical or poor product decisions and says harmful products are still being released, at the cost of losing consumer trust (and unfortunately sometimes human lives).
Kathy asks several questions:
Do we truly understand the community we’re building for? Where and how do we store data? If we deliver a “cool” product, how does the tool mine user information and who is actually responsible for it? How can the issue of failed or poorly designed services that can lead to issues of human rights, justice and ethical concerns be addressed?
Notes from our internal discussions:
- We arrived at the age-old debate around the responsibility of knife- and gunmakers in about two seconds. Do guns kill people or is it people that do?
- We could agree though that it’s not the responsibility of a creator to anticipate and be responsible for every kind of malicious use of their creation, but it absolutely is their responsibility to react to known ways of misuse.
- Is there such a thing as objective ethics? Implementing your ethical decisions into your products is a way of forcing your own point of view on your users – is that a problem though?
- There’s of course an app to make ethics decisions: https://www.scu.edu/ethics-app/
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