As I mentioned the last time I wrote about Bitcoin, I’m not an economist: I’m a technology journalist who is intrigued on a technical level by the theory and mechanics behind a distributed, algorithmically-generated “currency”, and that makes me want to track it and occasionally cover it when the tech angle is strong. Now, I don’t actually own any Bitcoins, but what if I did?

If I were to own stock in a tech company (I don’t, by the way) and I found myself writing about said company, I would at the very least be obliged to put a disclosure into the article — in fact, I would probably just avoid writing about the firm altogether. However, bloggers and journalists don’t follow that convention with currencies. Imagine an American journalist covering the fortunes of the dollar, and putting in a disclaimer to say that all her savings are held in USD – it would seem daft.

So I posed the question on Twitter earlier: “What are the ethics of writing about Bitcoin if you’ve bought some (I haven’t). Does it require stock-style disclosure?” Some quickly responded in the affirmative:

@superglaze I disclose my Bitcoin holdings when I write about them.

— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) March 22, 2013

@kristajessica @superglaze Same principle applies to media owners owning property and their papers constantly talking up house prices

— Natasha (@riptari) March 22, 2013

Whereas others were more circumspect:

@andyvan @superglaze I haven’t thought about it in as much detail, but I don’t think it’s the same as having stock.

— Nate Lanxon (@NateLanxon) March 22, 2013

There’s some serious debate going on about whether or not Bitcoin actually is a currency, but I (like the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems) feel that it is, albeit an unique one. Its uniqueness stems not only from the way in which its creation is automated, but also from its current volatility and, crucially, the fact that people don’t generally understand it very well. We all know what nationally-issued currencies like dollars and yen are, and we don’t need the concept explained to us every time we read an article about them. The situation with Bitcoin is very different.

I strongly suspect Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in recent weeks is largely an echo chamber effect — coverage begets coverage — which puts those writing about it in an unusual position. We bloggers and journalists have an extraordinary amount of influence in people’s perceptions of Bitcoin and, as a result, the trajectory of its value. For that reason alone, I think any coverage from a writer who has bought into Bitcoin should come with a clear disclosure.

That said, my colleague Tom Krazit also brought up an interesting tangential point in discussion, suggesting that writers covering Bitcoin may actually have an obligation to buy into it on a low level, so they can conduct a few transactions and basically have a clearer idea of what they’re talking about in their coverage.

This is all clearly a new and unusual field to explore, so I’d be interested in hearing further thoughts on the subject.

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UX designers’ primary job is to improve usability and extend productivity. But they also have a responsibility to address the unintended consequences of new technologies, some of them with a clear ethical dimension. Following is a look at some of the principle ethical quandaries that UX designers will run up against and must deal with responsibly.

Human costs and de-valuing work

So much of the UX discipline’s early efforts were driven by the desire to improve human performance and productivity while reducing errors. Few questioned the value of these gains, achieved by optimizing system design, augmenting human ability, and automation, especially as it eliminated dangerous, repetitive, or tedious work – think of assembly line factory jobs that in past decades injured and maimed scores of people.

But some forms of automation come at the cost of diminishing the work’s intellectual and emotional value. Consider the levels of automation found in fast-food restaurants or warehouse fulfillment centers, where work is de-humanized, worker growth is diminished, and the value of rewarding work is stripped away. Undoubtedly these issues were at play with the spate of protests and suicides by distraught Foxconn workers in recent years.

The question for the UX professional who designs these work experiences then is: at what point must efficiency and optimization yield to human concerns?

‘De-skilling’

Over the past two decades, there have been tremendous advances in the development of powerful support systems that augment human intelligence in demanding environments. For example, some aircraft systems, such as the  Boeing Dreamliner and the  F-35 Lighting II, have become so complicated that they challenge the human capacity to fly them without assistance from an “intelligent” assistant.  The positive benefits of this technology can reduce error and improve safety.

At the same time, UX researchers must examine the possibiliy that automation can create a situation where skilled operators can be replaced be less-skilled operators. (On a mainstream level, that would include losing the ability to navigate without the aid of GPS, or more simply the ability to do math without using a calculator.)

In some cases, the gains from technology will outweigh the loss of skills. In others, the level of support and automation might warrant reconsideration. Whatever the outcome, it is critical that UX designers initiate this conversation, so that users of technology can make informed choices about their extent and consequences.

Influencing user behavior

We’ve gotten pretty good at being able to subconsciously influence and alter behavior (by nudging, for one), which creates a vexing ethical conundrum for UX designers. The UX professional must understand that for every product created with the “best intention,” there will be another that deliberately nudges the user to ends not in the user’s best interest.  Thus on the one hand, they recognize that human behavior often results in sub-optimum choices and actions. On the other hand, they recognize that they have the potential, through design, to affect that behavior in other ways – positive and negative.

So how do UX professionals define their ethical responsibilities as they subconsciously influence users’ decisions or actions? The case of producing negative outcomes is clear; less clear is who determines what is “positive.” The line between the two is often not well defined. Take for instance the medicare prescription drug plan finder tool on the medicare.gove site which navigates this dilemma well. It guides and supports the user in an unbiased fashion to the plan that best aligns with their health needs – a great improvement over early support efforts on the site.

The erosion of privacy

With the best intentions, technologies have been developed to remotely monitor the activities of the elderly – what and how much they eat, where they’re located, even when they take their prescriptions. Similarly, products like vuezone or  Car Connection allow parents to monitor every movement of their children – what they’re doing at home, how fast they are driving, where they are at 2 a.m.

The benefits of such technologies are real, for one allowing the elderly to live independently or for parents to be confident in the safety of their children . Yet such constant monitoring of the individual can also have the opposite effect, instead leaving one feeling the loss of highly valued privacy and dignity because of non-stop monitoring. With each new capability comes added consequences.

The dangers of distraction

The convergence of technologies can tax our attention spans in a way that threatens the limits of human capabilities. One case is the increased integration of communication, navigation, and entertainment technologies in automotive design. We now have GPS screens, entertainment monitors, handsfree cellphone use, and advanced stereo systems with various control mechanisms.

While these technologies deliver unquestionable value and pleasure to the driver and passengers, they indisputably divide the operator’s attention, distracting him or her from the stated purpose of driving, leading to life- threatening situations (and that’s not even including texting while driving). The problem has become so severe that the Highway Safety Administration has created a website to address this issue.

So what responsibility do UX professionals have in these situations? The likelihood of distraction and its consequences should become an area of intense focus in the UX discipline’s research agenda.

At the end of the day, UX professionals must increasingly consider where their responsibilities lie – with the organization that reaps financial gains from the technology sold, or with the user who may possibly suffer negative or life- threatening consequences from these products.

Bill M. Gribbons is professor of information design and corporate communication and director of the graduate human factors program at Bentley University. 

Photo courtesy Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com.

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The plan in which 10 columnists received $2,000 to $36,000 each to write about Malaysia was carried out by Joshua Trevino, an opinion writer and the operation’s bagman. Trevino himself, who was a columnist for the Guardian until the paper dropped him in 2012 over conflict-of-interest issues, received $389,724 from the government of Malaysia.

The Malaysian government’s goal was to discredit Anwar Ibrahim, an opposition leader and the target of a politically charged sodomy trial that was decried by human rights groups.

The upshot is that prominent American media outlets printed propaganda from a semi-totalitarian foreign government. While the scheme is disturbing, it is not entirely new; nasty regimes have long used Washington PR firms to spread disinformation.

What is new, however, is how much easier it’s become to place such propaganda thanks to online journalism’s insatiable appetite for content. Today, publications of every stripe are eagerly sucking up outside contributions to fill their websites. The contributions are tarted up with a variety of names — such as “expert opinions” or “guest voices” — but they amount to the same thing: additional content that is often free.

But in their rush to pump up their content, sites may be dropping their screening standards. Unlike like the New York Times, which has long had strict systems to prevent conflicts of interest, many online publications may not have the time or the energy to rigorously watch for bad apples.

In response to an email query, the Huffington Post offered the following statement: ”This is a clear violation of HuffPost’s blogging policy that requires disclosure of payments and conflicts of interest. As soon as we learned of this conflict, we removed the posts from our site. In addition to a very clear policy, we have a team of blog editors who are trained to spot potential conflicts as they review each blog that gets submitted. Posts are routinely declined.”

Jack Fowler, the publisher of National Review, declined to provide an immediate comment; he has since provided a response in the comments below.

While after-the-fact measures may mitigate the damage, it doesn’t change the fact that, in this wild-west clamor for content, it’s become easier for the likes of Malaysia’s leaders to ooze their voice into American media. (Likewise, some companies have succumbed to the temptation of hiring sock-puppet journalists to shill for their side.)

Overall, it’s perhaps inevitable that more content has brought more corruption to the media. The good news, however, is that the growth of online media outlets also affords the opportunity for more whistle blowers; my colleague, Mathew Ingram, in the case of social media sites like Twitter, likens the process to a self-cleaning oven.

The Malaysia episode also reflects an other example of how BuzzFeed, best known for cat photos and titillating viral fare, is rapidly climbing the serious media firmament.

(Disclosure: the Guardian News & Media is an investor in paidContent’s owner, Giga Omni Media).

(Image by Straight 8 Photography via Shutterstock)

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The answer depends on you ask, but it raises a question that is becoming more and more relevant in this era of “big data”: namely, just because certain kinds of information are publicly available and can be filtered and aggregated in various ways, does that mean we are always justified in publishing them? It also raises a question we have written about before in a different context: Does publishing things in a newspaper give them more weight than just making the same information available online?

The paper that published the gun-ownership information is the Journal News, a Gannett-owned publication that covers the region around New York City. Editors submitted freedom-of-information requests for the names and addresses of registered gun owners in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties — information that is public by state law — and then plotted those addresses on a Google map.

Was there a larger issue at stake? The paper says yes

The Journal News feature pointed out that each dot on the map only represented someone who had applied for and received a permit to own a handgun, and didn’t mean they actually had one. It also noted that the information only covered pistols or revolvers, and not rifles, shotguns or the type of assault rifle that was used in the Sandy Hook school shooting — all of which can be bought without a permit. And the newspaper wrote a long story about why it published the data: in part, because it believes that such information should be more available to the public, so that residents know who in their neighborhood owns guns, as well as how many and what kind.

Within hours of being published, the story and map were circulated through Facebook and Twitter — the map has been recommended on Facebook almost 40,000 times — and were loudly criticized by conservative news outlets such as Instapundit and Fox News. Some readers protested that publishing the data in such a way opened owners up to theft or intimidation: one said that the article was designed to “sensationalize the anti-gun frenzy” and another argued that by publishing their addresses, the paper had equated them with “sex offenders and murderers,” since those are the other kinds of public information that are usually mapped by newspapers.

In retaliation for the perceived injustice of publishing gun-owners’ addresses, at least one blogger — a lawyer, real-estate agent and author — published the addresses of journalists and executives at the Journal News, including the paper’s publisher and the editor, as well as the reporter who wrote the story accompanying the map. In addition to their addresses, he also published links to their public Facebook profiles and photos, saying journalists should be prepared to have their own personal information become public if they are going to do so to others.

Should the media have its own Hippocratic oath?

There was almost as much debate among media-industry insiders about the wisdom of publishing this data as there was outside the industry. New York Times editor Patrick Laforge and Guardian writer Heidi Moore, for example, went back and forth on Twitter for some time about the propriety of publishing such a map — with Moore arguing that it served no real journalistic purpose, since there was no larger point to the data: in other words, no larger issue was being raised, none of the owners were interviewed, and the data was not used to make any kind of broader point about gun ownership.

@moorehn @palafo but if gun ownership is good, why the outrage over publicizing? Why is this worse than showing home prices, for example?

—
Barry Graubart (@graubart) December 26, 2012

Poynter Institute faculty member Al Tompkins also argued that the newspaper handled the information in the wrong way, saying the publication of the gun owners’ addresses would have been appropriate if it was related to an investigative series on gun violence or a story with substantial public benefit — but since it wasn’t, he said the paper had not justified its invasion of people’s privacy. In effect, Tompkins argued that journalists should be bound by something like the physician’s oath, which states “First, do no harm.”

But does the simple act of mapping gun permits qualify as harm? And how can publicizing that be an invasion of privacy, if the data itself is legally considered public? Those are just a couple of questions the Journal News piece raises. The first seems to have as much to do with the perceived power of the newspaper as it does anything else — just as the publication of a photo by the New York Post (of a man about to be hit by a subway train) was seen as reprehensible in part because of the way it publicized that event.

The second question goes to the heart of the “open government” or “open data” movement: there are reams of information contained in theoretically public databases that many people might still consider private, whether it’s school information or voting records — in the same way that information on Facebook or other social networks may technically be public, but is also seen by many as private (as illustrated by a recent incident involving Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook’s co-founder and CEO). At what point are we justified in making that data fully public? The answers to those questions are far from clear.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Demis Vrublevski

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Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.

Instead, he is advising the government to legislate the creation of a new independent body to promote “high standards” and safeguard individuals’ rights, run by a chair and a board who will hold publishers to a code.

Leveson is leaving the definition of that code and the implementation of the new body to whomever Prime Minister David Cameron, should he follow the recommendation, might appoint to set them up. But Leveson suggests the code should outline what constitutes “public interest” – a thorny topic on which newspapers and others often disagree.

The Lord Justice says publishers will be incentivised to adhere to this code because it will create an alternative dispute arbitration forum that will be cheaper than court battles — if publishers lost against a complainant in court, they would face heftier damages awards than in arbitration.

Whether this is enough of an incentive if unclear — after all, news publishers have operated in what Leveson called a “reckless” manner with the threat of hefty court fines up until this point.

Newspaper industry campaigners had worried that Leveson’s report, if it required legislation, would amount to state interference in newsgathering. They had highlighted United States citizens’ right to free speech under their First Amendment. But Leveson says:

“This is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press. The legislation would not establish a body to regulate the press: it would be up to the press to come forward with their own body that meets the criteria laid down.

“The legislation would not give any rights to Parliament, to the Government, or to any regulatory (or other) body to prevent newspapers from publishing any material whatsoever.

“Nor would it give any rights to these entities to require newspapers to publish any material except insofar as it would require the recognised self-regulatory body to have the power to direct the placement and prominence of corrections and apologies in respect of information found, by that body, to require them.”

That definition of the body’s role sounds somewhat akin to that of the existing Press Complaints Commission, which is now discredited. But Leveson also says: “(The legislation) would enshrine, for the first time, a legal duty on the Government to protect the freedom of the press.”

But the new body must be recognised by Ofcom, the existing and powerful regulator of UK radio spectrum, telecommunications infrastructure and broadcasting standards — and Leveson suggests Ofcom be used as a “backstop” regulator for publishers that refuse to join the new scheme.

Leveson said: “For the seventh time in less than 70 years, there is a new report commissioned by the government dealing with concerns about the press. The PCC has failed in the task — if, indeed, it ever saw itself as having such a task — of keeping the press to its responsibilities to the public. There must be change.”

In sum, the Leveson Inquiry report amounts to a stern telling off for British newspapers, sets the basic colour and ideas for a slightly enhanced regulatory body but leaves all of the next steps to government — a process that is likely to be mired in ongoing political wrangling.

Update: Prime Minister David Cameron says he agrees with much of the recommendations but not the need to create the new body through state legislation:

“For the first time, we would have crossed the rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land.

“We should, I believe, be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press.

“In this House – which has been a bulwark of democracy for centuries – we should think very, very carefully before crossing this line.”

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Debate has been brewing in the UK since July, when crime and thriller authors from around the world gathered at the popular annual Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. A panel on ebooks featured two British thriller authors, Steve Mosby and Stephen Leather. During the panel, Leather revealed that he uses “sock puppet” accounts. Fellow panelist Mosby transcribed the exchange on his blog (and the recording is available here):

SL: I’ll go onto several forums, from the well-known forums, and post there, under my own name and under various other names and various other characters. You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself. And then I’ve got enough fans.

[Mosby]: So you use sock puppet accounts, basically?

SL: I think everyone does. Everyone does. Or I have friends who are sock puppets, who might be real, but they might pick a fight with me.

[Mosby]: Are your readers aware of this, or…?

SL:  Well, I think that everyone … well, are the readers aware of it? No … But they’re not buying it because of the sock puppet. What you’re trying to do is create a buzz. And it’s very hard, one person, surrounded by a hundred thousand other writers, to create a buzz. I mean, that’s one of the things that publishers do. They create a buzz. One person on their own, difficult to create a buzz. If you’ve got 10 friends, and they’ve got friends, and you can get them all as one creating a buzz, then hopefully you’ll be all right.

Jeremy Duns, a British author of spy novels and a journalist who now lives in Sweden, began investigating Leather and turned up two of his “sock puppet” accounts, one of which belonged to a real self-published author named Steve Roach. “Roach had been very annoyed at what Leather was doing in the Amazon forums,” Duns told me. “He called him out quite aggressively. Leather reacted very furiously and waged a campaign against Roach for about a year online.”

Roach told Duns that Leather posted one-star reviews of his books to Goodreads and wrote a short story featuring “a sleazy villain” after Roach. Leather also created a Twitter account, @WriterRoach, in Steve Roach’s name. He used it to promote his own books and to make digs at Roach.

‘You’ve outsmarted me’

“Steve Roach sent an email to Stephen Leather saying, can you please stop? You’ve outsmarted me,” Duns says. “Leather was very gracious in his acceptance that he had beaten this guy. He said, I actually have two Twitter accounts in your name. I’m going to delete one of them and give the other one to you.”

Duns taped his phone conversation with Roach, but Roach now says he was tricked and wasn’t told he was being taped.

When I got in touch with Leather, he called Duns a “troll” and sent me a PDF of a letter written by Roach which begins, “With regard to the confrontations that I had with Stephen Leather while we were promoting our books on the Amazon forums, I do not look back on it as cyberbullying, more a straightforward confrontation in which I eventually conceded defeat (because Leather was better at it than I was).”

Leather also confirmed to me that he had created fake accounts to review his own books. “Yes, I said that. It was recorded so I can’t really deny it,” he wrote to me in an email. “But I never really got a chance to explain what I meant and there was an element of mis-speaking, but yes I said it. I didn’t do it much, and only over a couple of months. The reason was that writers were coming in for a lot of flak when they posted under their own names and I was being trolled unmercifully. So it was easier to talk to other posters using a pen name, which is something that the majority of forum users do.

‘I should have just kept my mouth shut’

“I didn’t attack people, generally it was just a way of talking to readers.  I haven’t done it for well over a year.  I also tweeted under different names, and again most people on Twitter use pen names. I don’t do that any more, either. Basically at Harrogate I was asked how a new writer could get themselves known and I was trying to explain how to get a word-of-mouth buzz going. . . . Obviously with hindsight I should have just kept my mouth shut.”

Leather’s print publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, had no comment.

More recently, the New York Times reported that thriller author John Locke — the first self-published author to sell over a million books on Kindle — paid several thousand dollars for 300 reviews through a now-defunct site called GettingBookReviews.com. Locke had attributed his success to low prices (all his books are $0.99) and fan outreach.  ”Reviews are the smallest part of being successful,” Locke told the NYT’s David Streitfeld. “But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.”

Over the weekend, Jeremy Duns exposed British thriller author RJ Ellory for promoting his own books under fake accounts and slamming books by rivals (Ellory has since apologized), while crime writer Stuart Neville has begun “naming sock puppet names” on his blog.

The retailer response

In response to my query on how it has handled “sock puppet” reviews, Amazon sent me a link to its review guidelines with no other comment.

Barnes & Noble did not respond to my request for comment.

Kobo did not directly answer my question about reader reviews. “We’re in the process of formalizing our online/social media guidelines,” Rene d’Entremont, the company’s media relations manager, told me. But those guidelines apply to Kobo employees, not to users. “For online book reviews, we collaborate with Goodreads.com, a company that shares the same core values of transparency and using social to encourage conversations among readers,” d’Entremont said.

Social reading site Goodreads also has review guidelines that prohibit “commercial reviews.” Members can also flag suspect reviews. “Our approach to reviews is very different from other sites,” CEO Otis Chandler told me. When users click on a book, the first reviews they see are by their friends, then from people they’ve chosen to follow, and finally from the broader community. The Goodreads algorithm prioritizes community reviews by number of ‘likes,’ the popularity of the reviewer and how recent the review is. “One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I hear from members is that they find reviews on Goodreads more real and trustworthy — ‘you can tell they are by real readers’ — than reviews on other sites,” Chandler says.

A code of ethics for writers

So far, 56 authors — including Laura Lippman, Michael Connelly and Lee Child — have signed this statement vowing they’ll never create “sock puppet” reviews. ”But the only lasting solution is for readers to take possession of the process,” they write. “The Internet belongs to us all. Your honest and heartfelt reviews, good or bad, enthusiastic or disapproving,­ can drown out the phoney voices, and the underhanded tactics will be marginalized to the point of irrelevance.”

The UK-based Crime Writers’ Association posted a statement on “sock puppets” on its website and says it’s “keen to find a course that helps preserve the integrity of crime writing, and the traditional supportiveness of the genre.”

So far, the “sock puppets” controversy has centered around crime and thriller authors, and the issue has received the most attention in that community. But these practices aren’t limited to one genre of books, and fake reviews remain a widespread problem not just for books but for other products online, with University of Illinois professor Bing Liu estimating that a third of online reviews are fake.

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How the model works and what it found

In order to train their model, the researchers fed it two sets of tweets — one they had determined to be about bullying activity and another that was not. Once the model had learned the language identifiers of tweets relating to bullying, it was time to turn it loose on real-world tweets. Not only did the system start identifying a great number of tweets, but it also discovered time patterns (they occur most frequently during the school week) and was able to pick out who played what role in the bullying.

In terms of demonstrating the power of big data, the latter might be the most interesting part because it actually uncovered an entirely new insight into the sociology of bullying. Not only are there the long-known roles of bully, victim, accuser and defender, but the researchers found that on social media, at least, there’s also the reporter. That’s someone who witnessed or heard about a bullying incident, but wasn’t involved, yet still commented on it.

Going forward, the team wants to add a sentiment analysis capability to its model so it can determine how individuals’ feelings are actually affected by bullying. It also wants to track bullies and victims over time, something not possible in traditional social science surveys that typically involve one-off interviews with children who know they’re being listened to. Just like with companies trying to uncover the causes of certain consumer trends, the researchers can follow groups of children over time via Twitter, trying to detect how and why they do what they do, and perhaps how relationships evolve.

Is Twitter a research lab, or an always-on wiretap?

The bigger policy and, really, ethical question that comes out this type of research is how we act upon it. The easy (or at least non-controversial) course of action — and something the researchers already suggest — is giving policymakers better data on which to base legislation or other efforts to prevent and punish bullying. Hopefully, they’ll listen. As I explained last week, the results of studies such as this one can provide valuable insights on which to base public policy, not just back up someone’s predetermined stance on an issue.

A more-controversial result of this research — especially if it goes on for an extended period of time — is how and when to actually intervene. As researcher Jerry Zhu says about the addition of sentiment analysis in the press release highlighting the study, “The idea is that if someone is powerfully affected by the event, if they are feeling extreme anger or sadness, that’s when they could be a danger to themselves or others. Those are the ones that would need immediate attention.”

Morally, this seems like the right thing to do, but it opens up a whole can of worms legally. How accurately can a machine learning algorithm actually determine feelings that might lead to physical harm? What level of intervention is actually allowable or advisable, and who should do it — the researchers, parents, the police? Where’s the line between what’s worth intervening on and what’s not, especially when we’re talking about mandatory reporters and potential harm to children? Will Twitter be forced to turn over user data without a search warrant?

Given the power such algorithms and the relative low cost of computing, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see schools or law-enforcement agencies start monitoring social media sites themselves to detect incidents of bullying, or maybe even child abuse. And although most tweets are publicly visible, a great deal of Facebook data happens behind that platform’s guarded walls. Could lawmakers demand companies like Facebook actively monitor their sites for these types of messages, or at least give agencies’ access to the social activity of minors?

Big data techniques are already used to fight crime, but this is a lot different than predicting where criminals will strike or which convicts are likely to reoffend. I’d certainly want to know if my daughter were being bullied, but I’m not sure I’d to find out from some strange researchers, or Twitter or the police. If my daughter were accused of being a bully, I’d fight tooth and nail to discredit the accuracy of the “evidence” and the legality of the monitoring. And I’m not sure anyone could live with themselves if they knew something was happening but didn’t act until it was too late.

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and I don’t think anyone really does right now. But with more data than ever available about what’s going on in people’s lives, combined with cutting-edge analytic techniques and technologies, and our society’s seeming determination to raise our children in a sterile world with bumpered walls, we might have to answer these questions sooner rather than later.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Stocksnapper; bully image courtesy of Shutterstock user MANDY GODBEHEAR.

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The company recently held its second-annual Compassion Research Day, during which it presented some new methods for users to confront those by whom they perceive they’ve been wronged. A blog post by the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center — with whom Facebook collaborated to develop the new conflict resolution protocol — details what Facebook is doing and what its research uncovered.

Rather than simply give users the option to unfriend, otherwise block contact with, or accuse someone of harassment — all rather impersonal and excessive methods for handling a minor social faux pas — the new tools let users explain why they find a particular post or photo offensive and to request the person who posted it take it down. Users can choose from a selection of casual in tone but specific explanations, or just type something personal like, “Hey, dude, I’m trying to get a job and that post makes me look like a drunk. Can you take it down?”

There are even special options developed for teenage users, who often have different reasons for finding content offensive and need different language than adults to express their concern.

The findings have been overwhelmingly positive. More people are sending messages than under the old system and, more importantly, more of the offending content creators — more than half, actually — are removing the photos in question and actually replying to their friends who sent the messages.

This is a good start toward empowering the subjects of photos and videos to take control over where their likenesses show up, something I’ve lobbied for before.

Does online civility translate into the real world?

Of course, Facebook is likely trying to do more than just play relationship counselor between friends or save users from the effects of embarrassing photos — it’s also trying to curb very real problems such as cyber-bullying. Just like anonymity makes it easier to troll web forums and comment sections looking for fights, the digital nature of social media makes it easier to harass others in ways one might not in the physical world. Absent a meaningful way for a victim to communicate his or her feelings, it’s probably easy for bullies to forget their victims are living, breathing people.

At the very least, the advent of social media seems to have changed bullying into a persistent activity from which kids can’t escape even when they’re at home. Even after Staten Island teen Amanda Cumming committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a bus — reportedly as a result of incessant bullying — her tormentors continued to hurl insults on her Facebook wall as she lay in the hospital.

And although bullying and ostracization have been part of childhood since well before Facebook, social media are part of a perfect storm of dehumanization. If there’s merit to the argument that increasingly violent movies and video games are desensitizing us to violence, there’s probably also merit to the argument that social media are making us less adept at forming strong personal bonds with other people.

There’s a reason that every atrocity such as the one last week in Colorado is followed up with a national discussion over movies and video games and a scouring of suspects’ online accounts for clues as to why they acted out. And even if the killers are often the bullied rather than the bullies, it’s all the same. It’s all part of a cultural shift toward fewer of the interactions that might lead actually lead someone to feel sympathetic.

But there’s no turning back from the digital revolution, so we’d better figure out a way to make it more human so kindness doesn’t become a foreign concept. What Facebook is trying to do probably won’t stop shooting sprees — or even stop generally mean-spirited people from going out of their way to run over turtles — but making people think twice before posting embarrassing content by making it easier to approach them about it is a good start.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Helder Almeida.

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On Thursday, the New York Times reported on the company’s pivot in business model; I followed up with a post about whether it will be able to keep its claim of moral superiority now that it’s essentially selling its methods to third parties that might not have been inspired by the same noble vision to get into the lending business. What neither post detailed was how ZestFinance’s new business might actually work to help reduce the approximately $8 billion extra (Merrill’s number, which seems to take into account total revenue rather than just rollover fees) Americans paid to payday lenders last year.

ZestFinance is no altruist– it’s a business designed to turn a profit, after all — but Merrill appears to believe steadfastly it’s on the right side of the ethical line. If it can take even 10 percent off the cost of payday loans, he said, that’s an annual savings of up to $800 million for borrowers, which is hardly chump change. “We’re not shooting for infield singles,” Merrill said, “we’re shooting for homeruns.”

Big banks are the key

Outsourcing its lending model to online companies such as Spotloan is one way to spread its data-driven underwriting model, but ZestFinance’s real democratizing effect might come from its pending partnerships with large banks and credit card companies. “The market won’t really be transformed until the big providers come back into it,” Merrill said, and ZestFinance provides a means for them to do that.

What’s interesting, Merrill explained, is that payday lenders require borrowers to have a checking account, which means they’re already tied into the larger banking system. Traditional banks have payday borrowers as potential loan customers, but banks often deal in larger loans (versus the $1,000 cap from Spotloan), and their reliance on traditional credit scores to assess risk means they generally won’t borrow to individuals with poor credit. What banks need is a way — like ZestFinance — to assess good credit risks who just happen to have bad credit, so they can create new products to serve them.

“[If I'm a bank],” Merrill explained, “I don’t have to find those customers, I just have to serve them better.”

For credit card companies, which already have products aimed at individuals with lower credit scores, Merrill said the challenge is finding a way to increase their approval rates without taking on undue risk. There, he said, he expects a situation like what happened when ZestFinance co-founder Shawn Budde was at Capital One and the company came into the subprime credit-card market with lower APRs, forcing the rest of the industry to follow suit. Credit cards might never be the cheapest means of credit, Merrill acknowledged, but done right they can be a lot cheaper than payday loans.

And actually, he said, payday lenders have approached ZestFinance about partnerships, too, “but those are the types of discussions we’re more careful with.” Most aren’t evil, he said, they really do want to provide a service, but their inability to assess risk beyond just looking at someone’s paycheck and work history has resulted in necessarily higher rates. If payday lenders want to stay relevant, though — especially as more banks get into the business of servicing small loans — Merrill thinks they’ll have to come around to ZestFinance’s way of thinking.

Douglas Merrill image by Pinar Ozger; banker image courtesy of Shutterstock user Goodluz.

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Merrill and former Capital One executive Shawn Budde launched ZestCash in 2006 2010  (it was founded in 2008) with the idea of using troves of personal data from the web and elsewhere to provide short-term loans to individuals underserved by traditional lenders. You can say what you want about ZestCash’s actual practices — it has been called out in the past for being little more than an online payday loan business, equally as predatory as its brick-and-mortar counterparts — but what made ZestCash a darling of the tech community was its use of thousands of variables not related to traditional credit scores to determine credit risk. According to its founders, it was big data for a bigger cause (below you can see Merrill discussing ZestCash with Ryan Kim at our Structure: Data event).

The shift in business is probably a good idea — at least in theory. As Hardy’s article notes, ZestCash was having a hard time obtaining state licenses to operate, and also had an uphill battle in gaining mindshare against payday loan lenders that have physical locations spread across nearly every city in the country. Informing payday loan customers that ZestCash existed in the first place was likely hard enough, but nothing compared with getting them to use the service.

Hence ZestFinance, a move that wisely fuses the growing trends of data platforms and analytic services. It’s one thing to have the data (or, in ZestFinance’s case, know where to find it) that can benefit another company, but it’s yet another to have the data-science chops to actually analyze it in a useful manner. ZestFinance has both and so, it seems, is poised for success if it can amass a pool of loan-provider customers that see the value in assessing risk based on actual data points and algorithms rather than relying on an exclusionary FICO process or a hit-or-miss paycheck analysis. In the end, better assessment of risk could lead to products that benefit both lenders and borrowers.

However, if ZestFinance was indeed founded with a noble goal in mind, its shift into an underwriting service would seem to increase the chances of it becoming an enabler of ever-more-predatory lending practices as it deals with a customer base of payday lenders and credit-card companies. There’s a classic fear, for example, that as soon as insurance companies are able to start collecting and analyzing our web footprints, they’ll start to use them against us by denying coverage or jacking up rates. Landlords in large cities are already running complex analyses to ensure they’re charging as much as the market will allow for their rental properties, potentially leaving existing tenants and all but the highest-paid apartment hunters out in the cold.

No one at ZestFinance was available for a comment today, but I intend to speak with the company soon to discuss its new business model. Big data is a powerful tool and ZestFinance certainly knows how to harness it, but it’s easy to see how things could go wrong when applying those techniques in a field already teetering on the edge of what many consider ethical.

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