Ethical Issues

Identify any ethical issues raised by your software. For example:

Are users' privacy expectations met by your software?

User interactivity in our app will be minimal. Users will be required to log in to access the features of the app, and login and personal information will be protected behind Google Firebase's user authentication. Users will not be able to chat with other users, which removes the possibility for a lot of privacy concerns and abuse/ cyberbullying. Users will be able to search for other specific users to add friends, but limited personal information will be available (username, first name, profile picture if desired) and once users are friends, each user will be able to see how much of their progress on the app friends can see.

Could the use of your software result in racial, gender, religious, or any other type of discrimination? How does your software try to mitigate this problem?

There is little room for user interaction, outside of friend requests and following the progress of friends, so there is little room for discrimination here. The markers will hopefully not provide room for unconscious bias either, as we have pulled a wide range of markers from all over South Carolina, pulled from an independently maintained database, so it is unlikely that any sort of socioeconomic or geographic discrimination would result from which markers the app displays.

Can your software be abused by some users to cause harm to other users? or to the public at large? How do you mitigate it?

Because of the limited ways for users to interact, there are few ways for the software to be used by one user to harm another. The primary ways, beyond possible security breaches (discussed on the security issues page), would be either by a user leaving a harmful review on a marker or by abusing the ability to track another user's activity to determine when they go out of town and rob them or something along those lines. We will mitigate the first possible issue by moderating user comments reviewing markers if we decide to add that feature to our app. For the second feature, we will inform users of this risk and allow them to limit what information their friends on the app are able to see.