Ethical Considerations

Are users' privacy expectations met by your software?

The main ethical issue present with LifestyleReact is user privacy. Users will be providing a large amount of data about their body and their daily lives. This means that users expect us to only use their information in ways that are relevant to the app. This expectation of privacy will be met by not sharing the user's data with other users or third parties such as advertisers.

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?

The final version of LifestyleReact will allow users to create and share custom recipes. This creates the possibility for unscrupulous users to create recipes that feature inappropriate or hateful content. This will be addressed by screening each custom recipe for inappropriate or hateful content and preventing any recipes that contain this content from being posted. In addition, users will be able to report recipes for inappropriate content.

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

The only method of interaction between users within the app will be the creation of custom recipes. This could be used to harm other users by placing certain dietary restriction tags on recipes that do not fit within those restrictions. An example of this would be tagging a recipe that features animal products as vegetarian or tagging a recipe with a high amount of sodium as heart healthy. This can be mitigated by allowing users to report recipes that are incorrectly tagged and checking the contents of the recipe against the tags that have been applied to it.