Ask OLPC a Question about Social Issues

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Social Issues

This page deals with issues related to Social Issues.

FAQ

The full impact of the OLPC will only be determined with time. Nevertheless, you may have concerns about recipient governments, child safety, privacy, abuse. A discussion of metrics can be found here, and a general discussion of social issues surrounding laptop deployment can be found here.

Child Safety Concerns

There is a general statement on child safety at Online threats and security.

Cultural impact

Replace with a link to summary/discussion of this issue.

Ownership and theft

Replace with a link to summary/discussion of this issue.

Overall impact

What would be the possible social, technological and economic implications of the commitment to the initiative for a country like Nigeria or similar?

You mean like ending poverty, empowering the entire population politically, recording and saving all of Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and other Nigerian culture, and setting Nigeria on the path to full development? I have no idea what technology will come out of Nigeria after all that, but I'm sure that it will.--Mokurai 02:23, 13 October 2006 (EDT)

See Social Impact--Mokurai 18:17, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Lack of Schools and Infrastructure

How will OLPC benefit countries when the majority of children do not attend public school or public school is not available?

Your statistics are questionable. What is your source for such an outrageous statement? In any case, the OLPC is not distributing laptops to schools, they are distributing laptops to kids. In thousands of small towns and villages, the existence of a mesh of laptops will create a learning infrastructure that can function without a school building.

Intellectual Property Rights

Another poster mentioned scams, but I can see spam and virus generation as also a problem (there goes the Linux virus advantage).

I love the idea. In addition to the effect on the countries involved, I think that worldwide, lots of open source projects, including Wikipedia, are going to get a tremendous boost from this. I don't think the world has any idea what's going to hit it. But there's also a tremendous potential for abuse, and I think that OLPC (and your community, i.e. us) has a responsibility to be thinking about that also.

--192.118.34.228 07:31, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

We are talking licensing very seriously with the machine. We will be introducing "digital rights expression" as a core feature of the machine. --Walter 18:53, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

These sound like very hackable machines. Beyond expression, how do you do enforcement? --192.118.34.228 05:47, 18 October 2006 (EDT)

Theoretically, just because a person is poor or lives in a poor country does not mean that he should be treated as a criminal. If a Western government sees fit to permit computer exports to the wealthy elite of a poor nation with mild copyright laws, they should not bar the way of computers sent for humanitarian purposes to their common people. If a wealthy American or European is allowed to buy a computer that may permit him to pirate software or music if he chooses to, the same should be true for Bolivian schoolchildren. But I fear that it may take a great deal of advocacy to try to persuade many people of this basic principle. Yet consider the irony: the poor of the world spend little if anything on music or software, so the actual cost of their violations to authors is exceedingly low - while the software they learn to create and freely distribute on these open-access systems will be of great value to everyone in the world. Mike Serfas 22:32, 25 October 2006 (EDT)

Linux users do not pirate software, as a rule. This is because their software is Free. We will be promoting Creative Commons-Developing Countries licensing for other media, so that piracy will not be necessary. --Mokurai 18:45, 9 November 2006 (EST)

Malware and Productivity Security

How secure is the UI against virus, malware and other attacks? Because, it would seem that it wouldnt take long to infect all of Thailand's computers if they are all networked.

The OLPC doesn't run Windows. In fact it doesn't run standard Linux either.

The OLPC is designed so that the software in ROM can be easily and quickly be upgraded in the field. If we discover that someone is exploiting a security weakness, we can and will quickly fix it.

Does that not contradict itself? If it's field-upgradable, it's not ROM. If it's not ROM, then it's writable. If it's writable, then what keeps malware from writing to it?

Deployment Governability

Government efficiency

Also, I fear for the safety of the project, when you say the computers will be given to governments, who will distribute them to the people...We have all seen on TV the enormous amount of waste/inequality and abuse of power by governments of poor nations, that are given large handouts by outsiders. If food is wasted, and sold on the black market, you'd better be awfully careful with handing out computers! Even cheap ones! Why not get involved with teachers in schools in these poor nations, and head directly for the source instead of going through the middleman, and the buerocracy?.

Don't fear for the safety of OLPC. We don't have all our eggs in one basket; we are working with many different governments. If one government misbehaves, then they will be publicly embarassed because people can compare their behavior with other country governments. In particular, if Libya lives up to its promises then they will set a very high standard for other governments.

Also, the laptops will not be GIVEN to governments. The government must buy the laptops. And OLPC is not walking away from teachers and schools. On the contrary, we are developing working groups of teachers and school officials in the target countries to explain to them how the laptops can be used. We will provide ongoing support for these working groups and they, in turn, will support the teachers and schools in their country.

Corruption

I am concerned about Government abuse with this program. How would you monitor the Government of the country in which these laptops are distributed, to be sure that they go directly to the needy children? Some of these government officials are corrupted and might distribute these laptops to their relatives and friends with just a few going to the needy. How will this program be monitored? I am very concerned about this.

The OLPC cannot solve all the ills of the world. However we have gone to some effort to design a laptop that is unlike any existing laptops. The OLPC laptops are smaller than normal, slower than normal with less storage than normal. They are ideal for kids to use in education but not very useful for running a business or playing video games. From a cost-benefit point of view it would seem that a corrupt government leader would do better to spend their $100 million on something other than OLPC laptops.

Ownership and Selling of Laptops

If children are given the laptops, isn't it reasonable to assume that their families (most of which will assumingly be poor) might sell the laptops? I see the potential for a black market of these wonderful devices.

I think the participant countries can reduce the possibility of OLPC theft and illegal resale by:

1. keeping the laptops at school and only allowing the kids to take them home if there are needs like homework and exams.
2. Making parents to sign a promissory note at the initial issue agreeing that they will do their best to take care of it when the child brings it to home.
3. The wifi adapter can be used to track stolen OLPCs.
4. In the countries with high OLPC theft incidents the government in the country can launch public awareness media campaign to educate the public that stealing an OLPC = robbing a child's future.
5. With cooperation from online auctions like Ebay they can ban/restrict the unauthorized resale of OLPCs.
6. Buy 2 give one free" program will reduce the demand for the OLPC in the developed world. Like rich first worlders willing to pay unreasonably high prices for the OLPC for novelty purposes.
7. As a more objective solution to the issue in your question, the UN child labor laws should be slightly altered to adapt the needs of the children today. What I mean by that is although it is wrong to exploit children by forcing them to work in dangerous manual labor jobs, if the IT companies want to provide them will opportunities to earn some money in exchange for doing some light programming or data entry jobs for limited periods it should be allowed. That way the OLPC will become a tool that they can use to earn money too and hence they wont need to sell it for food money :-)

JK, USA

That is a risk. The main solution currently put forward by the OLPC (afaik) is flooding the environment with laptops (making them effectively worthless in a monetary sense since every child would have access to them, and through them, the whole community), and using social condemnation or stigma for when a person (adult) is known to have one (because after all the laptop is visibly a child's property). Now lets move to your items... :)

1. the intent is for the child to own the laptop. Ownership is a much better deterrent when damage may occur. Depriving them (and their families) from access to it makes that sense of property disappear.
2. signing a piece of paper would imply some sort of penalization if the 'deal' is broken... don't like it (personally)
3. wifi tracker? maybe... but since MAC addresses (although burned) can be spoofed...
4. campaigns should anticipate, not follow the problem - the damage will have been done already and the social stigma may be too hard to recover
5. eBay and similar will most likely help if the problem arises
6. a Buy 2 Get 1 program may in some ways make the problem worse: why pay double if you can get it half-price?
7. the United Nations doesn't make laws - just treaties, conventions, and similar to be signed (and passed into laws) by each country. Exploitation is condemmed, the same as hazardous and other types of 'improper' work. The charter (afaik) doesn't forbid a child from performing work and participating in the family's well-being (that would be inaplicable in most of the world - even in the developed world) For the record, the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Article 32 states:
   • 1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.
   • 2. States Parties shall take legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to ensure the implementation of the present article. To this end, and having regard to the relevant provisions of other international instruments, States Parties shall in particular:
     • (a) Provide for a minimum age or minimum ages for admission to employment;
     • (b) Provide for appropriate regulation of the hours and conditions of employment;
     • (c) Provide for appropriate penalties or other sanctions to ensure the effective enforcement of the present article.

Cheers --Xavi 14:03, 20 January 2007 (EST)

Military use

While this issue is mostly overlooked, it may surprise you to know that XO hardware, being somewhere in between industrial and MILSPEC hardened, equipped with extremely sophisticated networking measures, makes for a very powerful tactical computer. with the right software changes, a lot of militias, insurgents or even third-world state armies would be happy to put their paws on a shipment. XO's relatively modest hardware can easily host an embedded combat application. moral considerations would also not be a deterrant to these kind of people. with some modification capability, such an organization can remove distinctive marks from the laptops. While all the components are readily available in the market, the research, development and integration effort is beyond the capabilities of most such organizations. by performing this service for them and shipping "free" laptops, there is potential for serious havoc. (I'm a retired c4l officer and a systems administrator and have dealt with tactical computing before).