The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: Why Crowdsourcing Needs Ethics

This position paper for the workshop Crowd Work 2013 discusses some of the ethical implications of crowd sourcing in general and of contest-based crowd design in particular, especially in regard to the question of fair payment. The paper establishes four different categories of crowd sourcing with separate ethical challenges and argues for the crowd work industry to develop a code of ethics from within, in order to counter the exploitation and abuse that it often enables.