If Code is Law, who's in charge of Ethics?

As digital craftsmen, we have to take our responsibilities in our digital world. We build our universe, with its rules, its tools, its laws. However, if Code is Law, who’s in charge of Ethics?

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could; they didn’t stop to think if they should.

The industrial revolution was a massive movement for research and intellectual progress. Our society is going to its future at lightning speed, sometimes without taking time to think to this future itself. Question isn’t to know if we can get this or that technology available to the masses, but when. In the meantime, the free market pushes our economy to massive consumption of those technologies.

In 1989, the RFC 1087 was the first to mention digital ethics. 30 years later, what did we do to take care of it? As developers, designers, product managers, UX, etc., we have to protect our users from the free market overflows. That means prevent privacy leaks when users aren’t aware of the power of our apps.

How can we define this ethic for digital labors? Who’s wondering every day about its code and design consequences? Is not this code the freedom guarantee of our digital lives? Before we passed the limit, we must wonder: where does our responsibility start as a digital craftsman?