You could consider the recent example of free computer games being offered for children to play. When they have reached a certain proficiency, they have to obtain keys to progress further. These they purchase through their parent's credit card accounts! Is this ethical?

Use these keywords on Google News: apple game free children parents

@Ian; computer gaming is a serious concern. Gaming is very persuasive as it involves human emotions in the experience. One of the examples I read about in BJ Foggs book on Persuasive Technology, was how one of his students developed a game, which required the end user (a child) to provide their name and address before being able to continue playing. The game didnt ask for the information up front, it waited until the end-user was having fun, then prompted the questions. Gaming developers can pretty well ask children anything, once they engage the children in the game.

The examples you shared are useful. Full disclosure of costs should be provided up front if a gaming company want to be considered ethical. I'm only speculating here but I reckon these gaming companies make so much money from this strategy that they dont really care if anyone considers them unethical.            

@Peter; thank you for the references. The bus stop example is fascinating. This would only be ethical if full disclosure of the fake bus stop strategy was made to the patient (or the person responsible for the patient) before admission to the hospital. I will finish writing this and take a look at the robots paper. Thank you.

I did not think there would be much on your topic in single quotes above, but now a search with Google Scholar with the phrase in double quotes, followed by clicking on "Since 2013" reveals a wealth of recent information. (At least Scholar has not broken its

promise to be free and free of adverts!)

@Ian, there seems to be a difference in the way researchers view ethical issues and the way its generally written about on the web. Thank you for the heads up on using Google, nonetheless.

@Gail, yes, thank you for mentioning this, I had a similar experience with the HarvardX Business School (believe it or not). They said that the online course was free but after enrolling I found out that the course texts were not free. Enrolment was free but the course was not free. This was not made clear up front.

And what about the example of predatory publishers?

I found this today and I have to get this off my chest.

Google News pointed me to an article 'published' on capitalberg.com

The article was incomprehensible.

It had been paraphrased so badly that it was gibberish.

In fact it had been plagiarised.

All the articles on capitalberg were the same: Just pretending to be news in order to

grab some advertising dollars from unsuspecting advertisers!

@Ian, your right on the money, these types of websites are built specifically to be ranked high in the search engines and to make money from Adsense and Affiliate products. They scrape their content from other websites and provide no original content. Can buy one on eBay: http://stores.ebay.com.au/scottswebsites

Yes, plenty of examples in commercial websites. However, perhaps coercive is not so much a fixed attribute of a technology as a user perception? For example, my washing machine won't let me start a wash until I've closed the door. Is it coercing me to close the door? Maybe - but I don't feel coerced, I feel reminded. 

@Martin; Interesting point you make. The end user has to want to be coerced :). The design team has taken responsibility for the potentially negative side effects of using the washing machine. For the washing machine to be ethically sound though, theoretically speaking, the design team would need to inform the end user of the coercive design before the washing machine is sold. 

@Ian; theoretically speaking, the literature is saying it is ethically sound to do practically anything, as long as the end user is fully informed of the consequences and the design team take full responsibility for the outcomes.

The Facebook Wall is a prime example of coercive technology.  Simply put, Facebook regulates the content that users see in order to gain profit or influence others.  When users may be expecting to see a friend's status update, the rule system in place may prioritize a video about a recent technology (for which Facebook will receive advertising revenue). 

Though Facebook users have all agreed to this type of activity through the privacy policy, they may not know when or where it's happening.  

One prior instance of this was the "social experiment" that Facebook conducted and published without informing users.

Article:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dailymuse/2014/08/04/the-facebook-experiment-what-it-means-for-you/

Paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

There are so many of these technical obligations decided by someone for some good reasons. Air regulation, digital workflows, strong incitation to update on MacOS, security doors in underground, industrial security such as hand off systems, cars ui such as seatbelt warnings, etc. The question is whether these constraints or their multiplication are a serious threat, or a running situation only changing according to the technology. There is an interesting book by Juliette Volcer (in French) "Le son comme arme" ISBN-13: 978-2707168856. In her book, the author distinguishes between various category and degrees of coercion.

@Gail and Reece: about the MOOC example (and the whole field of education technology), education journalist Audrey Watters has collected her public talks. She also discusses the coercive / deceptive nature of some examples. See a review of her collected talks, in Times Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/what-monsters-lurk-in-your-lms-audrey-watters-on-education-technology/58599

Behavioural Advertising? The practice of tracking and recording information about users in order to provide "relevant advertising" to get them to buy products. This is both deceptive and coercive in that most people are not aware that marketers are tracking their online and offline activities and then using that information to persuade them to purchase products.

There is also some interesting work by Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University who does work on behavioural economics and focuses on issues like advertising and privacy. He has some work  on the impact of advertising that uses composite faces where a computer merges your face with your friend's face to create a non-real person you inherently want to trust.

There is also some of my own work on software updates where people are basically told that they have to update or they will loose some feature. Apple is particularly egregious about this, they push out a new shiny update that makes iTunes work with the latest iPhone while silently removing support for older devices like iPods effectively bricking working devices for unsuspecting users who download without checking first.

@Jason; Looks like the research was done by two scientists from Cornel university in conjunction with the Facebook Data Science Team. The paper does not justify the reasons why they did not inform their participants of the experiment. This is unusual. Every university has an ethics committee that must be informed before research can begin. They omitted the ethical issues from the paper, which may have been more interesting than the results :).

@Roland; I agree, when we consider how various forms of technology are designed, many of them include coercive elements, which are just considered 'normal'. While we like to think that website and software designers have our best interests at heart, it would be naive not to consider the possibility of coercion and deception being used on the Internet to achieve immoral and/or illegal outcomes.

@Rineke; thank you for the reference, this issue is a serious concern.

@Kami; I would like to see a company with full disclosure on their strategies. We all know companies like Google and Apple are motivated to make profits for their shareholders, yet they hide behind a facade of other motivations. In many ways, the way these companies portray themselves to consumers is a direct result of advertising. The advertising industry are the masters of making persuasion sound like facts.

you might want to look at Roger Schank's recent demolition of  IBM's 'Watson' and the claims made about that system.

(found on LinkedIn)

The Get Windows X campaign keeps the upgrade dangers and pains a secret.