August 1, 2020 By Brett Wilkins At Wednesday’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust hearing, tech CEOs Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) took a beating from lawmakers who grilled them on everything from monopolistic business practices Read more…
By Brett Wilkins The current wave of deadly civil unrest sparked by police and white supremacist killings of unarmed black people including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have brought increased scrutiny of tech companies’ business dealings with law enforcement agencies. This, in turn, has resulted in some leading Read more…
By Brett Wilkins A senior engineer and vice president at Amazon announced on Monday that he is resigning “in dismay” over the company’s termination of employees who speak out against dangerous and potentially deadly working conditions during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. A ‘Chickenshit’ Company Motherboard first reported the departure of Read more…
Amazon is the most customer-centric company in the world! But who is the customer? By Vahid Razavi Everyone is familiar with Amazon retail business and how small merchants that participate in its marketplace are leveraged to build Amazon’s own retail endeavors. This article is not about the merchants, but rather Read more…
By Vahid Razavi Amazon Web Services (AWS) has tremendous market share when it comes to the cloud customer base and cloud offerings. I am not here to argue its success, but rather to show that its success has been won at the expense of its partner ecosystem. Amazon pioneered this Read more…
Even as Amazon works out how to best protect its massive workforce from the rapidly-spreading coronavirus pandemic, the tech titan is taking measures to deal with price-gouging and fake cures being offered for sale on its site by unscrupulous sellers looking to make a quick buck from the crisis. Last Read more…
By Brett Wilkins The US military is adopting new principles for what it calls the ethical use of artificial intelligence technology in warfare, sparking widespread skepticism from ethics advocates and other critics. Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced the new AI ethics guidelines in a memo released on February 24 in Read more…
By Brett Wilkins November 11, 2019 Here and San Francisco and all across America, last week marked the end of another grueling political campaign season. Here in the City by the Bay, it was a time for celebration for progressives as too-close-to-call races broke in our favor. In District 5, Read more…
By Brett Wilkins Here at Ethics In Tech we like to make it clear to the world that we are not inherently against tech companies. To skeptics, we point out that our founder, Vahid Razavi, is actually a tech entrepreneur, having founded BizCloud and having worked for some of the Read more…
By Brett Wilkins One thing is for certain: at the end of next month, the US Defense Department will award a $10 billion contract to a tech company to develop and deploy JEDI. That’s not another less-than-serious Pentagon foray into Star Wars-inspired folly, like the Defense Innovation Unit’s recent quest Read more…