Reclaiming Social Engineering for Good
The article discusses the concept of social engineering and its potential for positive impact. It emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and addressing the challenges associated with social engineering in technology and policy. The author argues for a proactive approach to harnessing social engineering for beneficial outcomes.
- ▪Guru Madhavan is a systems engineer and author focused on social engineering.
- ▪The article highlights the need to confront the challenges of social engineering to improve user experience and security.
- ▪Madhavan advocates for using social engineering positively to address complex societal issues.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | IEEE Spectrum |
| Canonical URL | https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-engineering-good |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 13:00:01 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T13:02:36.889Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T13:02:36.889Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SaX1_qvd0wqS |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
History of TechnologyAIComputingOpinion Reclaiming Social Engineering for Good Why we can’t fix what we refuse to nameGuru Madhavan1m4 min readGuru Madhavan is a systems engineer and author of “Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World.” Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images {"customDimensions": {"5":"Guru Madhavan","11":2676879667,"7":"social-engineering, user-experience, policy, security","10":"social-engineering","6":"tech-history","8":"05/25/2026"}, "post": {"id": 2676879667, "providerId": 0, "sections": [0, 497728257, 497728259, 544169516, 539617903, 539619441, 544169525, 2267926519, 2289603494, 2289616244, 2289599789, 2289599424], "authors": [27428578], "tags": ["social-engineering", "user-experience", "policy", "security"], "streams": [], "split_testing": {}} }
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at IEEE Spectrum.
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