Here's one for the books (and for the DLB taxonomy of unethical designs). According to a recent AP article, parents who install Sentry and FamilySafe brand software to monitor their children's online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's instant messages, and sell gathered marketing data from them.

via.

The rest of this post writes itself.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about children and advertising. The point of that post was this: we don't find it conscionable to advertise cigarettes to kids. In fact, we seem to find it so uniformly unconscionable that we're willing to make it illegal. This indicated to me that we have here a wide-spread and serious moral commitment.

Since I wrote that post, I've been thinking more about the role of children in the advertising culture, and specifically about this legislation. It seems to me that here we have a stable empirical starting point for what I hope will become our positive discussion of design ethics (following both our argument for the pragmatic role of ethics in design, our diagnosis of the trust relationship at the heart of advertising, and of advertising's pursuant follies).

That said, I think the cart has been put just slightly in front of the horse, here. While we may (or may not) have stumbled on the empirical clue for our ongoing positive discussion of design ethics, the development of this line seems to me nevertheless very tricky.

In the interest of taking design ethics seriously and getting it right, then, there are some fairly significant unanswered questions left to address. While I am convinced that I will not answer a single one of these questions definitively here on BlogLESS, I am also convinced that having some rough and ready answers will provide the kind of scaffolding we'll need to develop any serious practical principles.

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I spent Monday talking about making our first shaky steps toward a so-called deeper design ethics. I drew a distinction between generic professional or business ethics, and the special kind of ethical concerns we have as people who fill up the world with the stuff we make.

In that post, I specifically mentioned two types of advertising campaigns -- those for Kellogg's sugary breakfast cereals, and those for tobacco products -- both of which were pulled from television and print media because of the consensus view that it is our duty to protect those members of our society who are so impressionable that they cannot be trusted to decide for themselves whether or not to use the harmful products that these advertisements were trying to sell them. Of course I am referring to children.

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