Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

ETHICS

 Ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use
to make choices to guide their behaviors.
 Information systems raise new ethical questions for both individuals and societies because they
create opportunities for intense social change, and thus threaten existing distributions of power,
money, rights, and obligations.
 Like other technologies, such as steam engines, electricity, the telephone, and the radio,
information technology can be used to achieve social progress, but it can also be used to commit
crimes and threaten cherished social values.
 The development of information technology will produce benefits for many and costs for others
Ethical Issues in Information
Technology
 Some of the major ethical issues faced by Information Technology (IT) are:

1. Personal Privacy
2. Access Right
3. Harmful Actions
4. Patents
5. Copyright
6. Trade Secrets
7. Liability
8. Piracy
Personal Privacy

 It is an important aspect of ethical issues in information technology.

 IT facilitates the users having their own hardware, operating system and
software tools to access the servers that are connected to each other and to
the users by a network.
 Due to the distribution of the network on a large scale, data or information
transfer in a big amount takes place which leads to the hidden chances of
disclosing information and violating the privacy of any individuals or a group.
 It is a major challenge for IT society and organizations to maintain the privacy
and integrity of data. Accidental disclosure to inappropriate individuals and
provisions to protect the accuracy of data also comes in the privacy issue
Access Right

 The second aspect of ethical issues in information technology is access right.

 Access right becomes a high priority issue for the IT and cyberspace with the
great advancement in technology.
 E-commerce and electronic payment systems evolution on the internet
heightened this issue for various corporate organizations and government
agencies.
 Network on the internet cannot be made secure from unauthorized access.
 Generally, the intrusion detection system are used to determine whether the
user is an intruder or an appropriate user.
Harmful Actions

 Harmful actions in the computer ethics refers to the damage or negative

consequences to the IT such as loss of important information, loss of property,
loss of ownership, destruction of property and undesirable substantial
impacts.
 This principle of ethical conduct restricts any outsiders from the use of
information technology in manner which leads to any loss to any of the users,
employees, employers and the general public. Typically, these actions
comprises of the intentional destruction or alteration of files and program
which drives a serious loss of resources.
 To recover from the harmful actions extra time and efforts are required to
remove the viruses from the computer systems.
Patents


It is more difficult to deal with these types of ethical issues. A patent can
preserve the unique and secret aspect of an idea.
 Obtaining a patent is very difficult as compared with obtaining a copyright. A
thorough disclosure is required with the software.
 The patent holder has to reveal the full details of a program to a proficient
programmer for building a program.
Copyright


The information security specialists are to be familiar with necessary concept
of the copyright law. Copyright law works as a very powerful legal tool in
protecting computer software, both before a security breach and surely after
a security breach.
 This type of breach could be the mishandling and misuse of data, computer
programs, documentation and similar material. In many countries, copyright
legislation is amended or revised to provide explicit laws to protect computer
programs.
Trade Secrets

 Trade secrets is also a significant ethical issue in information technology.

 A trade secret secures something of value and usefulness. This law protects
the private aspects of ideas which is known only to the discover or his
confidants.
 Once disclosed, trade secret is lost as such and is only protected by the law
for trade secrets.
 The application of trade secret law is very broad in the computer range,
where even a slight head start in the advancement of software or hardware
can provide a significant competitive influence.
Piracy


Piracy is an activity in which the creation of illegal copy of the software is
made.
 It is entirely up to the owner of the software as to whether or not users can
make backup copies of their software.
 As laws made for copyright protection are evolving, also legislation that
would stop unauthorized duplication of software is in consideration.
 The software industry is prepared to do encounter against software piracy.
The courts are dealing with an increasing number of actions concerning the
protection of software.
LIABILITY

 Liability extends the concept of responsibility further to the area of laws.

 Liability is a feature of political systems in which a body of laws is in place
that permits individuals to recover the damages done to them by other
actors, systems, or organizations.
 Due process is a related feature of law-governed societies and is a process in
which laws are known and understood, and there is an ability to appeal to
higher authorities to ensure that the laws are applied correctly
FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF THE
INFORMATION AGE
 The major ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems
include the following moral dimensions:
 Information rights and obligations. What information rights do individuals
and organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect?
 Property rights and obligations. How will traditional intellectual property
rights be protected in a digital society in which tracing and accounting for
ownership are difficult and ignoring such property rights is so easy?
 Accountability and control. Who can and will be held accountable and liable
for the harm done to individual and collective information and property
rights?
 System quality. What standards of data and system quality should we demand
to protect individual rights and the safety of society?
• Information rights and obligations (about ourselves, organization)

• Property rights and obligations (protection of intellectual property rights)

• Accountability and control (who will be held accountable if harm is done)

• System quality (standards of data and system quality)

• Quality of life (preservation of values, culture)

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT RAISE
ETHICAL ISSUE
 Think of all the ways you generate computer information about yourself—
credit card purchases, telephone calls, magazine subscriptions, video rentals,
mail-order purchases, banking records, local, state, and federal government
records (including court and police records), and visits to Web sites.
 Put together and mined properly this information could reveal not only your
credit information but also your driving habits, your tastes, your associations,
and your political interests. Companies with products to sell purchase
relevant information from these sources to help them more finely target their
marketing campaigns.
 The use of computers to combine data from multiple sources and create
electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals is called profiling.
 For example, several thousand of the most popular Web sites allow
DoubleClick (owned by Google), an Internet advertising broker, to track the
activities of their visitors in exchange for revenue from advertisements based
on visitor information DoubleClick gathers. DoubleClick uses this information
to create a profile of each online visitor, adding more detail to the profile as
the visitor accesses an associated DoubleClick site. Over time, DoubleClick
can create a detailed dossier of a person’s spending and computing habits on
the Web that is sold to companies to help them target their Web ads more
precisely
 A new data analysis technology called nonobvious relationship awareness
(NORA) has given both the government and the private sector even more
powerful profiling capabilities. NORA can take information about people from
many disparate sources, such as employment applications, telephone records,
customer listings, and “wanted” lists, and correlate relationships to find
obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists
When confronted with a situation that seems
to present ethical issues, how should you
analyze it?
Identify and describe clearly the facts

 Find out who did what to whom, and where, when, and how. In many
instances, you will be surprised at the errors in the initially reported facts,
and often you will find that simply getting the facts straight helps define the
solution. It also helps to get the opposing parties involved in an ethical
dilemma to agree on the facts.
Define the conflict or dilemma and identify
the higher-order values involved.

 Ethical, social, and political issues always reference higher values. The
parties to a dispute all claim to be pursuing higher values (e.g., freedom,
privacy, protection of property, and the free enterprise system). Typically, an
ethical issue involves a dilemma: two diametrically opposed courses of action
that support worthwhile values.
EXAMPLE
Identify the stakeholders.

 Every ethical, social, and political issue has stakeholders: players in the game
who have an interest in the outcome, who have invested in the situation, and
usually who have vocal opinions. Find out the identity of these groups and
what they want. This will be useful later when designing a solution.
Identify the potential consequences of
your options
 Some options may be ethically correct but disastrous from other points of
view. Other options may work in one instance but not in other similar
instances. Always ask yourself, “What if I choose this option consistently over
time?
Internet Challenges to Privacy

 Web sites can learn the identities of their visitors if the visitors voluntarily
register at the site to purchase a product or service or to obtain a free
service, such as information.
 Web sites can also capture information about visitors without their
knowledge using cookie technology. Cookies are small text files deposited on
a computer hard drive when a user visits Web sites.
 Cookies identify the visitor’s Web browser software and track visits to the
Web site.
 When the visitor returns to a site that has stored a cookie, the Web site
software will search the visitor’s computer, find the cookie, and know what
that person has done in the past. It may also update the cookie, depending on
the activity during the visit.
Web beacons.

 There are now even more subtle and surreptitious tools for surveillance of
Internet users.
 Marketers use Web beacons as another tool to monitor online behavior. Web
beacons, also called Web bugs, are tiny objects invisibly embedded in e-mail
messages and Web pages that are designed to monitor the behavior of the
user visiting a Web site or sending e-mail.
 The Web beacon captures and transmits information such as the IP address of
the user’s computer, the time a Web page was viewed and for how long, the
type of Web browser that retrieved the beacon, and previously set cookie
values.
 Web beacons are placed on popular Web sites by “third party” firms who pay
the Web sites a fee for access to their audience. Typical popular Web sites
contain 25–35 Web beacons.
 There are now tools to help users determine the kind of personal data that
can be extracted by Web sites.
 The Platform for Privacy Preferences, known as P3P, enables automatic
communication of privacy policies between an e-commerce site and its
visitors.
 P3P provides a standard for communicating a Web site’s privacy policy to
Internet users and for comparing that policy to the user’s preferences or to
other standards, such as the FTC’s FIP guidelines or the European Directive on
Data Protection. Users can use P3P to select the level of privacy they wish to
maintain when interacting with the Web site.
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