It was Christmas Eve 2014 when Eric Meyer logged onto Facebook, expecting the usual holiday photos and well-wishes from friends and families. Instead, Facebook showed him an ad for its new Year in Review feature.
Year in Review allowed Facebook users to create albums of their highlights from the year -- top posts, photos from vacations, that sort of thing -- and share them with their friends. But Meyer wasn't keen on reliving 2014, the year his daughter Rebecca died of aggressive brain cancer. She was 6.
Facebook didn't give him a choice. Instead, it created a sample Year In Review album for him, and posted it to his page to encourage him to share it. "Here's what your year looked like!" the copy read. Below it was a picture of Rebecca. And surrounding her smiling face and curly hair were illustrations, made by Facebook, of partyers dancing amid balloons and streamers.
Meyer, a friend of mine who is also one of the Web's early programmers and bloggers, was gutted. "Yes, my year looked like that," he wrote in Slate. "True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my Little Spark. It was still unkind to remind me so tactlessly, and without any consent on my part."
When I started working in tech in 2007, I could never have imagined a blunder like this. Facebook had just begun transforming from a college-centric site to the behemoth it's since become. Google had just bought YouTube. The iPhone hadn't even launched yet. People were still writing "click here" on their links (and I was trying to get them to stop). But seven years later, something had started to feel off.
Despite all the improvements in technology, my peers and I weren't getting better at serving people. And Meyer's story really drove that home. Facebook had designed an experience that worked well for people who'd had a good year, people who had vacations or weddings or parties to remember. But because the design team focused only on positive experiences, it hadn't thought enough about what would happen for everyone else -- for people whose years were marred by grief, illness, heartbreak or disaster.
It's not just Facebook, and it's not just grief or trauma. The more I started paying attention to how tech products are designed, the more I started noticing how often they're full of blind spots, biases and outright ethical blunders -- and how often those oversights can exacerbate unfairness and leave vulnerable people out.
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