Not everyone was pleased to find the building full of Mites. Some in the department felt that the project violated their privacy rather than protected it. In particular, students and faculty whose research focused more on the social impacts of technology felt that the device’s microphone, infrared sensor, thermometer, and six other sensors, which together could at least sense when a space was occupied, would subject them to experimental surveillance without their consent.

Guo, E., & Ryan-Mosley, T. (2023, April 3). Computer scientists designing the future can’t agree on what privacy means. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/03/1070665/cmu-university-privacy-battle-smart-building-sensors-mites/

This was a problem for the budding tech ethicist. Widder’s academic work explores how software developers think about the ethical implications of the products that they build; he’s particularly interested in helping computer scientists understand the social consequences of technology. And so Mites was of both professional and personal concern. The same issues of surveillance and informed consent that he helped computer scientists grapple with had found their way into his very office.

 

It was through that lens that Widder viewed Mites. “I think nonconsensual data collection for research … is usually unethical. Pervasive sensors installed in private and public spaces make increasingly pervasive surveillance normal, and that is a future that I don’t want to make easier,” he says.