In 2016, the city of Chicago launched a predictive system to identify homes at risk of lead poisoning, aiming to protect children. The algorithm worked, but there was a problem: the zones identified as "at risk" corresponded almost perfectly to low-income African-American neighbourhoods. The system, built with good intentions, risked becoming a tool of racial profiling masked as public health.
This case illustrates a fundamental principle of civic tech ethics: good intentions are not sufficient. Every technological tool operates within pre-existing power structures and, if not designed with extreme care, risks amplifying them rather than correcting them. A civic participation app that requires a smartphone excludes those who don't have one. An open data platform in English excludes those who only speak Spanish or Arabic.
The concept of "Community-Centred Design" responds to these challenges. Instead of designing for communities, you design with communities. The people who will use the tool participate in its design from the very beginning — not as "users to test" but as co-designers with their own knowledge. This approach is slower, more expensive and more difficult. But it is the only one that produces truly useful and respectful tools.
Then there is the question of surveillance. Many civic technologies collect data on citizens — where they live, how they move, what they think, how they vote. Even when this data serves to improve services, it creates risks: it can be sold, hacked, used for purposes different from those stated. Ethical civic tech must be privacy-first by design, not as an afterthought.
Finally, civic tech ethics is about power. Who funds the platform? Who controls the code? Who decides the moderation rules? If the answer is always "a Silicon Valley tech company" or "a Global North NGO", we are reproducing colonial dynamics under a digital guise. True civic tech is where communities have not just access to the tool, but ownership and control over it.