Next month, Apple and Google will unveil features to enable contact tracing on iOS and Android to identify people who have had contact with someone who tests positive for the novel coronavirus.

Security experts have been quick to point out the possible dangers, including privacy risks like revealing identities of COVID-19-positive users, helping advertisers track them or falling prey to false positives from trolls.

These are fresh concerns in familiar debates about tech’s ethics. How should technologists think about the trade-off between the immediate need for public health surveillance and individual privacy? And misformation and free speech? Facebook and other platforms are playing a much more active role than ever in assessing the quality of information: promoting official information sources prominently and removing some posts from users defying social distancing.

As the pandemic spreads and, along with it, the race to develop new technologies accelerates, it’s more critical than ever that technology finds a way to fully examine these questions. Technologists today are ill-equipped for this challenge: striking healthy balances between competing concerns — like privacy and safety — while explaining their approach to the public.

Over the past few years, academics have worked to give students ways to address the ethical dilemmas technology raises. Last year, Stanford announced a new (and now popular) undergraduate course on “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change,” taught by faculty from philosophy, as well as political and computer science. Harvard, MIT, UT Austin and others teach similar courses.

If the only students are future technologists, though, solutions will lag. If we want a more ethically knowledgeable tech industry today, we need ethical study for tech practitioners, not just university students.

To broaden this teaching to tech practitioners, our venture fund, Bloomberg Beta, agreed to host the same Stanford faculty for an experiment. Based on their undergraduate course, could we design an educational experience for senior people who work across the tech sector? We adapted the content (incorporating real-world dilemmas), structure and location of the class, creating a six-week evening course in San Francisco. A week after announcing the course, we received twice as many applications as we could accommodate.

We selected a diverse group of students in every way we could manage, who all hold responsibility in tech. They told us that when they faced an ethical dilemma at work, they lacked a community to which to turn — some confided in friends or family, others revealed they looked up answers on the internet. Many felt afraid to speak freely within their companies. Despite several company-led ethics initiatives, including worthwhile ones to appoint chief ethics officers and Microsoft and IBM’s principles for ethical AI, the students in our class told us they had no space for open and honest conversations about tech’s behavior.

Like undergraduates, our students wanted to learn from both academics and industry leaders. Each week featured experts like Marietje Schaake, former Member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, who debated real issues, from data privacy to political advertising. The professors facilitated discussions, encouraging our students to discuss multiple, often opposing views, with our expert guests.

Over half of the class came from a STEM background and had missed much explicit education in ethical frameworks. Our class discussed principles from other fields, like medical ethics, including the physician’s guiding maxim (“first, do no harm”) in the context of designing new algorithms. Texts from the world of science fiction, like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, also offered ways to grapple with issues, leading students to evaluate how to collect and use data responsibly.

The answers to the values-based questions we explored (such as the trade-offs between misinformation and free speech) didn’t converge on clear “right” or “wrong” answers. Instead, participants told us that the discussions were crucial for developing skills to more effectively check their own biases and make informed decisions. One student said:

After walking through a series of questions, thought experiments or discussion topics with the professors, and thinking deeply about each of the subtending issues, I often ended up with the opposite positions to what I initially believed.

When shelter-in-place meant the class could no longer meet, participants reached out within a week to request virtual sessions — craving a forum to discuss real-time events with their peers in a structured environment. After our first virtual session examining how government, tech and individuals have responded to COVID-19, one participant remarked: “There feels like so much more good conversation to come on the questions, what can we do, what should we do, what must we do?”

Tech professionals seem to want ways to engage with ethical learning — the task now is to provide more opportunities. We plan on hosting another course this year and are looking at ways to provide an online version, publishing the materials.

COVID-19 won’t be the last crisis where we rely on technology for solutions, and need them immediately. If we want more informed discussions about tech’s behavior, and we want the people who make choices to enter these crises prepared to think ethically, we need to start training people who work in tech to think ethically.

To allow students to explore opposing, uncomfortable viewpoints and share their personal experiences, class discussions were confidential. I’ve received explicit permission to share any insights from students here.

The coronavirus has decimated the travel industry, and Airbnb, the home rental company that appeared unstoppable not so long ago, has not been spared.

While the headlines have focused on the measures it’s taking to stockpile cash to offset its losses, behind the scenes, the nearly 12-year-old company has been busily redesigning its products. These include rethinking its home screen and app landing pages to reflect a world where short-term stays are out and longer-term stays — including for medical professionals needing to quarantine themselves from their families — are in.

We talked with Airbnb’s chief design officer, Alex Schleifer, to learn more about what’s been changing behind the scenes, and how. Our chat has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

TC: Airbnb’s home page is suddenly very focused on three things — online experiences, monthly stays and what you’re calling “frontline,” which is an area for hosts to offer housing to healthcare staff and first responders. What was that design process like and how long did it take?

AS: Our team mapped it out in under three weeks. There were a couple hundred employees working on the project at any point in time — people from ops, products, localization, design, policy, engineering. It’s a complex operation (here); everything we need to do needs to be done in 60 languages. Because of the scale of everything we do, the idea is often the easiest piece.

The difficulty was [sharpened] because the crisis was also impacting us. Everyone was working from home. There were questions around how do we do childcare, for example. But there was still immense energy, including because we had thousands of hosts contacting us and saying, ‘We want to help.’

TC: Where exactly do you start on a redesign like this one?

AS: You define the scope of it. You could put a banner on your home page, or you can start talking with hosts and governments to understand what kind of help they need and whether this is something they want, then you start building. Part of that is looking at the behavior of the guests on our platform in real time, which changes every day. It’s also a matter of talking with other travel partners and seeing what they are doing.

Ultimately, we [decided to take] over a pretty large amount of real estate so front-line workers know where to go. They also use our core search, but we want to make sure they have specific space for people who want to donate space or support the program. We had a goal of 100,000 homes that would be provided, but we beat that goal faster than we thought we would.

TC: Are these spaces being offered at no cost?

AS: They are donated or offered at reduced pricing.

TC: Another new section now centers around ‘online experiences.’ These are hosts who are offering their own classes on cooking and other things?

AS: Yes, like “Sangria mixing with Pedro,” which is a cocktail mixing show with a lot of entertainment. Airbnb is all about connection — it’s built on hosting. But if not everybody is able to travel, the question becomes: what are our options here? We discussed a lot of ideas, but the way we were working and connecting as a team [remotely] and living online with family made this idea more concrete for us. So we contacted hosts, did trial runs with these hosts with mic set-ups [and everything else required] and launched with 50 people. Now, we have nearly 100 hosts offering experiences online and thousands more who’ve offered to host experiences. Some of the most popular offerings — which aren’t one-to-many experience where you are watching a show but rather an interactive experience — are already sold out.

(Above, Airbnb’s homepage before the updates.)

TC: Do you see this becoming a sizable piece of Airbnb’s business going forward?

AS: It’s only a few weeks old, but even for a product in its first version, we were really enjoying this. It has beaten expectations, and I do think it will be a huge business for us as we get out of the pandemic because it allows hosts to host both online and real-world experiences.

TC: I’m sure a lot of ideas have been batted around. How are you choosing what to circle around?

AS: We’re lucky to sit on a lot of data, but you can only test so much. You need really strong and fast decision-making, so leadership and the executive team would meet daily.

The other thing that as a designer I appreciate is we made sure to remove abstract layers of communication. We wouldn’t just load up a Google doc but we made it real using [the collaborative interface design tool] Figma to look at all the designs and quickly prototype and screen-share, whether with the experiences team or me or [CEO] Brian [Chesky], to see what customers would see and make decisions.

TC: You mention Figma. What other tools have you been relying on more heavily as you work from home?

AS: We like to use as few tools as possible, but Figma is a game changer because people can see decisions being made live. Google Docs is really powerful for us. Slack also allows us to work asynchronously, which is important. And Zoom has been critical to everyone.

TC: Things are changing by the day. Parts of the world are opening while others remain shut. How is this impacting your work?

AS: We built the product and site to be really modular and also targetable by region because you’re right, the world will open up on different schedules with different restrictions and permutations and we want to make sure we can offer to people what is available to them. In some cases, they might be [hampered by] travel within a certain distance, or air travel might not be open, so we want to help people to find things that are close by.

We’re also building other pieces continuously, some in direct response to the crisis, including a hub that communicates to our guests and hosts what’s happening with travel and what happens after the storm.

As a global company, we’re pretty used to [adapting to change]. Of course, this is a different scale.