Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Protection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Protection. Show all posts

Friday, June 26, 2020

Debunking the Secular Case for Religion

Gurwinder Bhogal
rabbitholemag.com
Originally published 28 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Could we, perhaps, identify the religious traditions that protect civilizations by looking at our history and finding the practices common to all long-lived civilizations? After all, Taleb has claimed that religion is “Lindy;” that is to say it has endured for a long time and therefore must be robust. But the main reason religious teachings have been robust is not that they’ve stood the test of time, but that those who tried to change them tended to be killed. Taleb also doesn’t explain what happens when religious practices differ or clash. Should people follow the precepts of the hardline Wahhabi brand of Islam, or those of a more moderate one? If the Abrahamic religions agree that usury leads to recessions, which of them do we consult on eating pork? Do we follow the Old Testament’s no or the New Testament’s yes, the green light of Christianity or the red light of Islam and Judaism?

Neither Taleb nor Peterson appear to answer these questions. But many evolutionary psychologists have: they say we should not blindly accept any religious edict, because none contain any inherent wisdom. The dominant view among evolutionary psychologists is that religion is not an evolutionary adaptation but a “spandrel,” a by-product of other adaptations. Richard Dawkins has compared religion to the tendency of moths to fly into flames: the moth did not evolve to fly into flames; it evolved to navigate by the light of the moon. Since it’s unable to distinguish between moonlight and candlelight, its attempt to keep a candle-flame in a fixed ommatidium (unit of a compound eye) causes it to keep veering around the flame, until it spirals into it. Dawkins argues that religion didn’t evolve for a purpose; it merely exploits the actual systems we evolved to navigate the world. An example of such a system might be what psychologist Justin Barrett calls the Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, the propensity to see natural phenomena as products of design. Basically, in our evolutionary history, mistaking a natural phenomenon for an artifact was far less risky than mistaking an artifact for a natural phenomenon, so our brains erred toward the former.

The info is here.

Saturday, October 5, 2019

Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.

Sigal Samuel
vox.com
Originally posted August 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

2. The right to mental privacy

You should have the right to seclude your brain data or to publicly share it.

Ienca emphasized that neurotechnology has huge implications for law enforcement and government surveillance. “If brain-reading devices have the ability to read the content of thoughts,” he said, “in the years to come governments will be interested in using this tech for interrogations and investigations.”

The right to remain silent and the principle against self-incrimination — enshrined in the US Constitution — could become meaningless in a world where the authorities are empowered to eavesdrop on your mental state without your consent.

It’s a scenario reminiscent of the sci-fi movie Minority Report, in which a special police unit called the PreCrime Division identifies and arrests murderers before they commit their crimes.

3. The right to mental integrity

You should have the right not to be harmed physically or psychologically by neurotechnology.

BCIs equipped with a “write” function can enable new forms of brainwashing, theoretically enabling all sorts of people to exert control over our minds: religious authorities who want to indoctrinate people, political regimes that want to quash dissent, terrorist groups seeking new recruits.

What’s more, devices like those being built by Facebook and Neuralink may be vulnerable to hacking. What happens if you’re using one of them and a malicious actor intercepts the Bluetooth signal, increasing or decreasing the voltage of the current that goes to your brain — thus making you more depressed, say, or more compliant?

Neuroethicists refer to that as brainjacking. “This is still hypothetical, but the possibility has been demonstrated in proof-of-concept studies,” Ienca said, adding, “A hack like this wouldn’t require that much technological sophistication.”

The info is here.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

HHS issues voluntary guidelines amid rise of cyberattacks

Samantha Liss
www.healthcaredive.com
Originally published January 2, 2019

Dive Brief:

  • To combat security threats in the health sector, HHS issued a voluminous report that details ways small, local clinics and large hospital systems alike can reduce their cybersecurity risks. The guidelines are voluntary, so providers will not be required to adopt the practices identified in the report. 
  • The four-volume report is the culmination of work by a task force, convened in May 2017, that worked to identify the five most common threats in the industry and 10 ways to prepare against those threats.  
  • The five most common threats are email phishing attacks, ransomware attacks, loss or theft of equipment or data, accidental or intentional data loss by an insider and attacks against connected medical devices.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Hackers are not main cause of health data breaches

Lisa Rapaport
Reuters News
Originally posted November 19, 2018

Most health information data breaches in the U.S. in recent years haven’t been the work of hackers but instead have been due to mistakes or security lapses inside healthcare organizations, a new study suggests.

Most health information data breaches in the U.S. in recent years haven’t been the work of hackers but instead have been due to mistakes or security lapses inside healthcare organizations, a new study suggests.

Another 25 percent of cases involved employee errors like mailing or emailing records to the wrong person, sending unencrypted data, taking records home or forwarding data to personal accounts or devices.

“More than half of breaches were triggered by internal negligence and thus are to some extent preventable,” said study coauthor Ge Bai of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Washington, D.C.

The info is here.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Re-thinking Data Protection Law in the Age of Big Data and AI

Sandra Wachter and Brent Mittelstadt
Oxford Internet Institute
Originally posted October 11,2 018

Numerous applications of ‘Big Data analytics’ drawing potentially troubling inferences about individuals and groups have emerged in recent years.  Major internet platforms are behind many of the highest profile examples: Facebook may be able to infer protected attributes such as sexual orientation, race, as well as political opinions and imminent suicide attempts, while third parties have used Facebook data to decide on the eligibility for loans and infer political stances on abortion. Susceptibility to depression can similarly be inferred via usage data from Facebook and Twitter. Google has attempted to predict flu outbreaks as well as other diseases and their outcomes. Microsoft can likewise predict Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease from search engine interactions. Other recent invasive applications include prediction of pregnancy by Target, assessment of users’ satisfaction based on mouse tracking, and China’s far reaching Social Credit Scoring system.

Inferences in the form of assumptions or predictions about future behaviour are often privacy-invasive, sometimes counterintuitive and, in any case, cannot be verified at the time of decision-making. While we are often unable to predict, understand or refute these inferences, they nonetheless impact on our private lives, identity, reputation, and self-determination.

These facts suggest that the greatest risks of Big Data analytics do not stem solely from how input data (name, age, email address) is used. Rather, it is the inferences that are drawn about us from the collected data, which determine how we, as data subjects, are being viewed and evaluated by third parties, that pose the greatest risk. It follows that protections designed to provide oversight and control over how data is collected and processed are not enough; rather, individuals require meaningful protection against not only the inputs, but the outputs of data processing.

Unfortunately, European data protection law and jurisprudence currently fails in this regard.

The info is here.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Robot sex and consent: Is consent to sex between a robot and a human conceivable, possible, and desirable?

Lily Frank and Sven Nyholm
Artificial Intelligence and Law
September 2017, Volume 25, Issue 3, pp 305–323

Abstract

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots.

The article is here.

Monday, July 17, 2017

The ethics of brain implants and ‘brainjacking’

Chelsey Ballarte
Geek Wire
Originally published June 29, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Fetz and the report’s other authors say we should regard advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence with the same measure of caution we use when we consider accountability for self-driving cars and privacy for smartphones.

Fetz recalled the time security researchers proved they could hack into a Jeep Cherokee over the internet and disable it as it drove on the freeway. He said that in the world of prosthetics, a hacker could conceivably take over someone’s arm.

“The hack could override the signals,” he said. It could even override a veto, and that’s the danger. The strategy to head off that scenario would have to be to make sure the system can’t be influenced from the outside.

Study co-author John Donoghue, a director of the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, said these are just a few things we would have to think about if these mechanisms became the norm.

“We must carefully consider the consequences of living alongside semi-intelligent, brain-controlled machines, and we should be ready with mechanisms to ensure their safe and ethical use,” he said in a news release.

Donoghue said that as technology advances, we need to be ready to think about how our current laws would apply. “Our aim is to ensure that appropriate legislation keeps pace with this rapidly progressing field,” he said.

The article is here.

Friday, May 13, 2016

Madness

By Eyal Press
The New Yorker
Originally posted May 2, 2016

Here are two excerpts:

By the nineties, prisons had become America’s dominant mental-health institutions. The situation is particularly extreme in Florida, which spends less money per capita on mental health than any state except Idaho. Meanwhile, between 1996 and 2014, the number of Florida prisoners with mental disabilities grew by a hundred and fifty-three per cent.

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After the Herald article appeared, Jerry Cummings, the warden, was placed on administrative leave, and many people questioned whether the Department of Corrections had tried to cover up a case of lethal abuse. Far less attention was paid to why an inmate had exposed it, rather than one of the prison’s mental-health or medical professionals. The duty to protect patients from harm is a core principle of medical ethics. According to the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, an offshoot of the American Medical Association which issues standards of care for prisons, any mental-health professional who is aware of abuse is obligated “to report this activity to the appropriate authorities.”

The article is here.

Monday, March 23, 2015

The Best-Selling, Billion-Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People

How the destitute and the mentally ill are being used as human lab rats

by Carl Elliott
Matter
Originally posted on July 27, 2014

Here are two excerpts:

If you’re looking for poor people who have been paid to test experimental drugs, Philadelphia is a good place to start. The city is home to five medical schools, and pharmaceutical and drug-testing companies line a corridor that stretches northeast into New Jersey. It also has one of the most visible homeless populations in the country. In Philly, homeless people seem to be everywhere: sleeping in Love Park, slumped on benches in Suburban Station, or gathered along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, waiting for the free meals that a local church gives out on Saturdays.

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Not long ago, such offers would have been considered unethical. Paying any volunteer was seen as problematic, even more so if the subjects were poor, uninsured, and compromised by illness. Payment, it was argued, might tempt vulnerable subjects to risk their health. As trials have moved into the private sector, this ethical calculus has changed. First came a hike in the sums that volunteers could be paid: Many clinical trial sites now offer over $6,000 for an inpatient drug study. Eligibility requirements have changed, too. For years, trial sites paid only healthy volunteers, mainly to test new drugs for safety. These days people with asthma, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and other conditions can be paid take part in trials.

The entire article is here.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Nana Cams: Personal Surveillance Video and Privacy in the Age of Self Embellishment

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.
Bioethics.net
Originally posted September 10, 2014

In David Eggers’ novel, The Circle, a fictional internet company creates and encourages users to video stream their lives. Wearing a small camera, people can share every experience of every day with whomever wants to follow them…except to the bathroom. The first streamers become instant celebrities and instant villains. The result is the end of privacy as anyone has known it. The upshot, according to the fictional company, is that if people know they are being watched (or might be being watched), people will behave more civilly. The echoes of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon notwithstanding, at the end of the book the protagonist suddenly wonders if the recording of all lives comes at too high a cost.

The entire blog post is here.

Friday, July 25, 2014

A new tactic to halt child abuse in Maryland

Focus now on helping low-risk families instead of punishing

By Yvonne Wenger
The Baltimore Sun
Originally posted July 5, 2014

Baltimore is changing the way it handles cases of alleged child abuse and neglect — part of a broad social-services strategy that has been touted by Maryland officials but abandoned in some other states.

The new approach, which is designed to lessen the adversarial relationship between families and caseworkers, puts cases on different tracks depending on whether they are deemed high or low risk. The tiered response, used in 23 states, is regarded as a best practice by many child advocates.

The entire story is here.

Monday, November 4, 2013

World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki

Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects
World Medical Association
JAMA. Published online October 19, 2013. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.281053

Preamble

1. The World Medical Association (WMA) has developed the Declaration of Helsinki as a statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects, including research on identifiable human material and data.

The Declaration is intended to be read as a whole and each of its constituent paragraphs should be applied with consideration of all other relevant paragraphs.

2. Consistent with the mandate of the WMA, the Declaration is addressed primarily to physicians. The WMA encourages others who are involved in medical research involving human subjects to adopt these principles.

The entire document is here.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Suit Could Determine Protections for Police Department Whistle-Blowers

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
The New York Times
Published: October 13, 2013

When Officer Craig Matthews complained to his precinct commander about a quota system that he believed was resulting in illegal street stops and arrests, it did not take long, he said, for him to see a response: he was given undesirable assignments, a mediocre performance review and the cold shoulder from his immediate supervisors.

So Officer Matthews filed a federal lawsuit, seeking protection from retaliation by invoking the First Amendment — a standard strategy for whistle-blowers who believe they have been punished for coming forward.

But because Officer Matthews, 40, is with the New York Police Department, his rights are less assured.

The city has taken the position that because officers are expected to report misconduct, those who come forward as whistle-blowers are simply fulfilling their duty established by the patrol guide, a voluminous book of police procedures.

The entire story is here.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

New whistleblower protections take effect for federal contractors

By Jared Serbu
Federal News Radio
Originally published July 1, 2013

Effective Monday, whistleblower protections for federal contractors are being expanded to fill gaps that whistleblower advocates say have, until now, left tens of thousands of potential witnesses to wrongdoing vulnerable to retaliation by their employers.

Under any federal contract that's signed on or after July 1, reprisal protections will be extended for the first time to subcontractors who report waste, fraud or abuse.

The revision to federal statutes also entitles contractor employees to whistleblower protection when they report wrongdoing on a federal contract to supervisors within their own companies. Previous laws required them to take their complaints to a government office such as an inspector general, a government contract manager or a member of Congress in order to receive protection.

The entire article is here.