Ethics and Efficacy of Unsolicited Anti-Trafficking {SMS} Outreach

The sex industry exists on a continuum based on the degree of work autonomy present in labor conditions: a high degree exists on one side of the continuum where independent sex workers have a great deal of agency, while much less autonomy exists on the other side, where sex is traded under conditions of human trafficking. Organizations across North America perform outreach to sex industry workers to offer assistance in the form of services (e.g., healthcare, financial assistance, housing), prayer, and intervention. Increasingly, technology is used to look for trafficking victims or facilitate the provision of assistance or services, for example through scraping and parsing sex industry workers' advertisements into a database of contact information that can be used by outreach organizations. However, little is known about the efficacy of anti-trafficking outreach technology, nor the potential risks of using it to identify and contact the highly stigmatized and marginalized population of those working in the sex industry. In this work, we investigate the use, context, benefits, and harms of an anti-trafficking technology platform via qualitative interviews with multiple stakeholders: the technology developers (n=6), organizations that use the technology (n=17), and sex industry workers who have been contacted or wish to be contacted (n=24). Our findings illustrate misalignment between developers, users of the platform, and sex industry workers they are attempting to assist. In their current state, anti-trafficking outreach tools such as the one we investigate are ineffective and, at best, serve as a mechanism for spam and, at worst, scale and exacerbate harm against the population they aim to serve. We conclude with a discussion of best practices for technology-facilitated outreach efforts to minimize risk or harm to sex industry workers while efficiently providing needed services

Participant Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics

Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about. The findings of this study point to potential best practices for researchers conducting observation and analysis of public data

Palantir: Early Detection of Development Conflicts Arising from Parallel Code Changes

The earlier a conflict is detected, the easier it is to resolve—this is the main precept of workspace awareness. Workspace awareness seeks to provide users with information of relevant ongoing parallel changes occurring in private workspaces, thereby enabling the early detection and resolution of potential conflicts. The key approach is to unobtrusively inform developers of potential conflicts arising because of concurrent changes to the same file and dependency violations in ongoing parallel work. This paper describes our research goals, approach, and implementation of workspace awareness through Palantır and includes a comprehensive evaluation involving two laboratory experiments. We present both quantitative and qualitative results from the experiments, which demonstrate that the use of Palantır, as compared to not using Palantir 1) leads to both earlier detection and earlier resolution of a larger number of conflicts, 2) leaves fewer conflicts unresolved in the code base that was ultimately checked in, and 3) involves reasonable overhead. Furthermore, we report on interesting changes in users’ behavior, especially how conflict resolution strategies changed among Palantır users