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6 votes
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Testing end-to-end encrypted backups and more on Messenger
15 votes -
Facebook helped arrest a 17-year-old for having an abortion
13 votes -
I'm struggling with a potential ethical violation at work; feedback needed
I have a work-related ethics question, and I thought the fine people here on tildes were perfect to give feedback. I'll try to be brief but still give all of the information. Background I work for...
I have a work-related ethics question, and I thought the fine people here on tildes were perfect to give feedback. I'll try to be brief but still give all of the information.
Background
I work for an energy utility. This company isn't a charity, but it is a non-profit. We are owned by the people who buy power from us (called "members"). We don't profit off of the electricity we sell to our members, but we do generate extra electricity to sell to other utilities (mostly to for-profit ones). Any profit we make is either set aside for future use or is sent out to the members as a check. Yes, our members actually get a check each year. This cooperative was built to serve rural communities since at that point in history profit-driven companies weren't willing to spend the money to run electricity to these communities. We cover 90% (geographically) of our state, along with portions of a neighboring state. We generate using wind, hydro, solar, coal, and natural gas. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I believe roughly 30%-40% of our generation comes from renewables, and we now have a dedicated team researching nuclear power (SMNR) and energy storage (which would allow us to further shift to renewables).
Context
There is a PAC (an entity that throws money at politicians in exchange for votes) for rural electric cooperatives that we participate in. This PAC can only accept donations from our members or employees. While the stated purpose is to advocate for rural cooperatives in general, I personally think that largely translates into advocating for fossil fuels.
Every year there is a 10-day period in August where they start asking us employees to donate. Anyone can donate at any time, this is just the time that they emphasize it. Leadership has REPEATEDLY emphasized that there is no pressure and that our supervisors can't see who has and hasn't donated. I've been here nearly five years, and they've said this each time. I know that under the previous CEO (he left ~10 years ago) there was pressure to donate, and that's probably why they emphasize this now.
Issue
I've discovered however that the leadership CAN see information on who has donated and how much. PAC donations are public information, and the names and amounts can be easily seen online if you know where to look. I do believe that my division leader didn't know this, though I can't really know whether the other leadership did or didn't. There's no way to know if any supervisors have looked at this data or made decisions on it. After I brought it up to my division leader he thanked me and said he will send this new information out to our division.
However, communicating this to the rest of the company is beyond his control. He's alerted the people who can do this but what they do is up to them. While my division doesn't really care who donates, I get the impression that other divisions feel differently. IT has a profoundly different culture than the rest of the company. Senior leaders say there's no pressure, but that's not neciserily the case for supervisors and managers. It's been implied to me that the teams that work in power production, transmission planning, etc still have expectations about donations.
What to do?
So here's the core ethics question: Is it unethical for senior leadership to withhold this new information about the visibility of donations from the rest of the company? The assurance of anonymity was intended to reassure us that there would be no retaliation for those who don't donate and that there would be no favoritism for those who do.
Is this just a small thing that's not really important? If this is an issue, how significant is it? It's obviously not "dumping toxic waste in the river" bad, but it still feels like it must have some level (or potential level) of impact. If this is an issue, what actions would you personally take? How much would you be willing to risk taking action on this?
Thanks in advance, I just want to do the right thing.
16 votes -
The armchair psychologist who ticked off YouTube
1 vote -
Hide nothing
11 votes -
Google’s new Play Store rules target annoying ads and copycat crypto apps
8 votes -
‘Supercookies’ have privacy experts sounding the alarm
12 votes -
Denmark bans Chromebooks and Google Workspace in schools over data transfer risks
25 votes -
Amazon shared Ring security camera and video doorbell footage with police without a warrant
31 votes -
How traceable are you? - Experiment results & analysis
11 votes -
Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever - The city wants to get right what Sidewalk Labs got so wrong
10 votes -
Joe Biden officials to keep private the names of US hospitals where patients contracted Covid
4 votes -
Coinbase is selling US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users
11 votes -
Abortion Search Noise Generator
10 votes -
Two types of privacy
6 votes -
Security and privacy tips for people seeking an abortion
14 votes -
‘A mass invasion of privacy’ but no penalties for Tim Hortons
8 votes -
Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot
11 votes -
TOR Workshop - Sysadmin 101 for new relay operators - tonight, June 4th 2022 @ 19 UTC
3 votes -
A more detailed — and more sympathetic — review of the Murena One
5 votes -
The Murena One shows exactly how hard it is to de-Google your smartphone
8 votes -
Introducing: AMD Privacy View
12 votes -
How we track COVID-19 (and other weird stuff) in sewage
8 votes -
Move fast and break things
6 votes -
Contra Chrome
13 votes -
Analysis by computer science professor shows that "Google Phone" and "Google Messages" send data to Google servers without being asked and without the user's knowledge, continuously
11 votes -
Mozilla Rally - Data collection for research about data collection
9 votes -
Retrieving your browsing history through a fake CAPTCHA
12 votes -
Facebook, Google and other tech firms must verify identities under proposed UK law
3 votes -
Covid testing company "selling customers' DNA"
12 votes -
San Francisco district attorney claims California crime labs are using DNA from sexual assault survivors to investigate unrelated crimes
17 votes -
My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app, Otter.ai
4 votes -
The unnerving rise of video games that spy on you
14 votes -
How do you feel about social media archiving tools such as Pushshift?
On and off throughout the years, I have attempted to make my online footprint as small as possible, taking steps such as: using pseudonyms on social media creating a new account every year or so...
On and off throughout the years, I have attempted to make my online footprint as small as possible, taking steps such as:
- using pseudonyms on social media
- creating a new account every year or so
- overwriting old posts with a new message blanking out my original post
- "deleting" posts after a few days if the account has a higher probability to be tied to my real life
The last point, I put quotations around deleted because I understand that once I post something, it is not ever really deleted but it adds a barrier of entry to trying to dig into my personal life. Pushshift comes up because, try as I might, I seem to have difficulty getting accounts removed from their searches. Additionally, I think they allow you to download reddit data in bulk so even if I were able to get my name removed from the search results, the data could still exist on someone's hard drive, somewhere.
From your perspective, are services like Pushshift, that archive people's information without their explicit knowledge, ethical? On the one hand, I think of detestable content that users might post then delete later to avoid accountability. On the other hand, I think of people like me who want to keep their data footprint as small as possible because of the crazies who might utilize this information to do harm.
8 votes -
Google drops FLoC after widespread opposition, pivots to “Topics API” plan
16 votes -
Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff
25 votes -
Where a thousand digital eyes keep watch over the elderly
3 votes -
The battle for a powerful cyberweapon: A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware
4 votes -
No place to hide - UK campaign against end-to-end encryption
9 votes -
Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot)
4 votes -
The hubris of big data
4 votes -
Norway's data privacy watchdog fines Grindr $7.16 million for sending sensitive personal data to hundreds of potential advertising partners without users' consent
7 votes -
VPN testing reveals poor privacy and security practices, hyperbolic claims
20 votes -
You are the product
4 votes -
Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs
22 votes -
Our post-privacy world
7 votes -
How to scrub your online footprint?
I don't necessarily want to delete everything there is about me, but I want to significantly clean it. I've been deleting old accounts lately, I've seen some screenshots of my tweets on Reddit and...
I don't necessarily want to delete everything there is about me, but I want to significantly clean it. I've been deleting old accounts lately, I've seen some screenshots of my tweets on Reddit and I've asked the authors to delete them. They've been kind enough to do it.
But I feel like there's more that I need to do. I just realized that there are probably a lot of screenshots of YouTube comments and Tweets that I've put out there in the world with my name and face. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't drastically increase my footprint last year during my time on Twitter.
I'm not a techy person, I was thinking about asking or hiring some type of hacker or expert to help me. Because they could probably find more information about me than me.
Can anyone help?
17 votes -
An update on Standard Notes early pricing and roadmap
11 votes -
Proposed illegal image detectors on devices are ‘easily fooled’
9 votes