Shannon Vallor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara Universityand author of An Introduction to Software Engineering Ethics, a free downloadable teaching tool, believes app designers can do better. The needed improvement, however, won’t come from programmers and gaming companies waking up one morning with the vague epiphany that they’ve dropped the ball and are obliged to make a stronger commitment to the public good. First and foremost, they’ve got to separate signal from noise and focus on the most fundamental issues.

To help everyone zero in on the essentials, Vallor recently gave a talk atRenaissance 2014, an app developers conference in San Francisco. In her talk, Vallor discusses five important ethics questions that app designers should consider.

1. Should app designers go beyond the minimal restrictions of regulatory compliance when designing their data collection policies? (If so, what kind of information should be off limits? And, how much information is too much?)


2. Should app designers refrain from creating addictive tools and services, even if they can make tons of money tapping into and manipulating base desires and tendencies?


3. Should app designers feel responsible for participating in exclusionary markets that leave users in the dust who can’t afford their goods and services?


4. Should app designers temper their drive for competitive advantage by fostering other goods, like promoting more diversity in the developer community?


5. If app designers are developing products for a big company, should they be entitled to see themselves as mere cogs in the machine and blame anything that goes wrong on corporate decisions?

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