Ethical Issues

Are users' privacy expectations met by your software? Our website will have a terms of service and privacy policy that outline what the users can expect from The Bookstore App. Fastspring, a California company, operates a website that generates free privacy policies for websites and apps to help developers comply with internet laws and regulations. Due to the online nature of our website, and to assist the Bookstore with shipping and operating throughout the United States, we will have to allow California residents to opt not to have their information sold to third parties. However, since we do not plan to sell any users' information to any party, we will include this pledge in our Privacy Policy.

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? One of our aspirational features is a book recommendation tool, which, if AI were used, could pose the risk of discrimination, especially if trained on a small sample size. To mitigate this, we will probably keep the AI extremely simple – only recommending books by categories, or not rely on AI at all to recommend books, and just recommend bestsellers to everyone.

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? We believe the first two Ethical Considerations address the potential harms and our plans to mitigate them.