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WA05

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The Ethics of Clearview AI’s Facial Recognition Software In July 2025, Angella Lipps was tracked down by the Tennessee police in her home and arrested for a bank fraud she supposedly committed in Fargo, hundreds of miles away. She then spent over five months in prison for a crime she in fact did not commit. The charges were officially dismissed on December 23, 2025. This was due to her bank records showing that she could not have possibly been in Fargo at the time of the fraud. The reasoning for this false arrest was Clearview AI, which has a database of over 70 billion faces scraped from the internet without anyone’s permission. This is just the most recent and famous case, but Lipps isn’t the only case. So far, eight other individuals have been wrongfully arrested because of errors in the Clearview AI facial recognition software. Hoan Ton-That, Clearview AI’s founder, is mostly responsible for this due to his decision to scrape the entire internet, rather than building something...
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WA01 Final Draft

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  Unity’s Runtime Fee and the Move to Open-Source Engines Immediate Backlash and Vendor Lock-In In September 2023, Unity Technologies announced a new “runtime fee,” a policy that would charge developers $0.20 for each game installation after thresholds like $200,000 in annual revenue and 200,000 lifetime installs were met. The backlash was immediate and enormous. A massive amount of the Unity development base felt betrayed by a company they had trusted for years. For many developers, Unity was their primary source of income. This announcement made it clear that building your livelihood on proprietary software is a financially risky move. When someone else owns the foundation of your work, they ultimately control everything you build on top of it. The outrage that followed wasn’t just about money, and it exposed a deeper flaw in how a lot of modern software development works. Unity’s runtime fee was a case study in what happens when an entire creative industry depends on tools...
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9/16 Post

Response to prompt 1: When Ko states "even in software organizations, the point of the company is rarely to make software; it's to provide value", she is emphasizing that software isn't valuable by itself. The code and design patterns/technical features only matter to the extent of what they allow the users to accomplish. For example, Microsoft Word isn't valuable just because of the complexity of its codebase but because it enables users to write documents, edit text, collaborate, and share info efficiently. The user never interacts with the code directly, so what they see, and judge is the outcome. This distinction is important because it shifts the focus of software engineering away from being entirely technically based. In the case of Microsoft Word, its value could be measured by the number of active users, or customer satisfaction surveys. These provide insight into whether or not the software is providing users value effectively and whether people find it w...
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About me

 I am currently a computer science student at Dickinson College. I am very passionate about sharpening my tech skills and diving into a variety of projects. My goals are to land an exciting tech career.
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