EC-16.3 Responsible Data and Machine Learning, Privacy and Security
You can say what obligations attach to collecting data about people, recognise where a trained model can cause harm in a shipped product, apply the principles of collecting less and keeping it shorter, and reason about security as a property of a design rather than a feature added later.
Almost every device this area produces now collects data and many contain a trained model, and the ethical questions arrive with the hardware rather than with the research. This topic is written for the engineer who ships the product rather than the one who builds the model, which is the perspective the artificial intelligence course does not cover.
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Collecting data about people, and what that obliges
Consent that is informed and freely given, a stated purpose, and no quiet reuse for something else. These obligations exist whatever a local regulation says, because they follow from the duty rather than from the law.
NPTEL: Ethics in Engineering Practice (IIT Kharagpur) · CourseCollect less, keep it shorter
Data not collected cannot leak, and data deleted on schedule cannot leak later. Designing for the minimum needed is the cheapest protection available and the one most often skipped.
NPTEL: Ethics in Engineering Practice (IIT Kharagpur) · CourseWhere a trained model causes harm in a product
A model that performs worse for some users than others, or that fails silently outside its training conditions, ships that behaviour to everyone. Testing across the range of real users is an engineering obligation.
NPTEL: Ethics in Engineering Practice (IIT Kharagpur) · CourseExplaining a decision a model made
A person affected by an automatic decision is entitled to know why. If the system cannot produce a reason, that is a design limitation to be stated rather than an inevitable property of the technology.
NPTEL: Ethics in Engineering Practice (IIT Kharagpur) · CourseSecurity as a property of the design
Default passwords, unsigned updates and open debug ports are design decisions, not oversights. Security added after a product works is far weaker than security decided while it is being designed.
NPTEL: Cryptography and Network Security (IIT Kharagpur) · CourseUpdates, disclosure and the life of a product
A device that cannot be updated cannot be fixed when a fault is found. Knowing how a vulnerability will be reported to you and how you will respond is part of shipping, not an afterthought.
NPTEL: Cryptography and Network Security (IIT Kharagpur) · Course
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