Ethical Issues

Privacy Expectations

Our app encrypts data in transport and while it’s saved to the system. We cannot access or misuse any data sent by users on our app unless they give us the encrypted data with the key to decrypt it. The key negotiation is private between the two devices (see security issues: https://github.com/SCCapstone/Neptune/wiki/Security-Issues). Our users privacy expectations should be met.

Discrimination

Luckily, there is very little that can be done on our app regarding discrimination towards any sort of group. The main goal of our app is to send notifications between a client and server device, more specifically a phone and a computer. If someone were to actively be participating in discrimination via their phone and receiving notifications about it, then our app would notify them of those notifications. This problem would also come up in some desired aspects of our app, like file and clipboard sharing, and could be solved the same way. We would have to monitor the data and determine whether it is discriminatory or not and then decide whether to send it through, however, this would be taxing and unreasonable to do. What the user provides, we are not liable for.

Software Abuse

The main purpose of our software is to send notifications between a client and server device so that a user can see their notifications on the server (computer) without having to get up and look at the client (Android mobile device). An attacker could try to attack the app and read or write to a client’s notification data. In the past Android has dealt with issues involving hackers to be able to send mass notifications to Android users resulting in potential phishing campaigns. Something like this would most likely be a vulnerability on Android’s side but could be dealt with by delaying notifications when coming in in mass or even not accepting notifications when a massive amount is being sent at once.