Ethical Issues

Privacy Concerns

Potential privacy issues could arise from breaches in our database of user accounts. Such a breach could result in the names, email addresses and passwords of account holders. In case of a breach,this information could be used to compromise user's accounts with other services/applications/platforms and/or steal more information.

Discrimination Concerns

Our application should not allow for any kind of discrimination, as user accounts will not directly interact with each other. Additionally, no user information will ever be available or visible to anyone other than the user it concerns. Since users will not see each other, there will be no opportunity for users to profile, dox, harass, target, abuse, etc. another user.

Potential Abuse

Since users can't directly interact, the only possible avenue of interpersonal abuse would be a data breach that lead to account breaches on other platforms. Mitigating this risk would largely be done by the database hosting platform, Firebase. Otherwise, building our software with security in mind and encapsulating data away from users whenever possible is our strategy for preventing unauthorized access to user data. In regards to public safety at large, no sensitive information will be present on our application or on its associated databases. Thus, our application will present no threat to public safety.