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COURSE: Fundamentals of Information Technology TOPIC: Social, Legal, Economical and Ethical Issues of IT LECTURE: 7 Technology can be a double-edged sword. It can be the source of many benefits. One great achievement of contemporary computer systems is the ease with which digital information can be analyzed, transmitted, and shared among many people. But at the same time, this powerful capability creates new opportunities for breaking the law or taking benefits away from others. Balancing the convenience and privacy implications of using technology to track consumers and send unsolicited e-mail is one of the compelling ethical issues raised by contemporary information systems. 1. Understanding the moral risks of new technology. Rapid technological change means that the choices facing individuals also rapidly change, and the balance of risk and reward and the probabilities of apprehension for wrongful acts change as well. Protecting individual privacy has become a serious ethical issue precisely for this reason. In this environment it will be important for management to conduct an ethical and social impact analysis of new technologies. There may not always be right answers for how to behave but there should be management awareness on the moral risks of new technology. 2. Establishing corporate ethics policies that include information systems issues. Managers will be responsible for developing, enforcing, and explaining corporate ethics policies. A corporation should have an ethics policy in the information systems area covering such issues as privacy, property, accountability, system quality, and quality of life. The challenge will be in educating non-IS managers to the need for these policies, as well as educating the workforce. The Internet and electronic commerce have awakened new interest in the ethical and social impact of information systems. Internet and digital firm technologies that make it easier than ever to assemble, integrate, and distribute information have unleashed new concerns about appropriate use of customer information, the protection of personal privacy, and the protection of intellectual property. These issues have moved to the forefront of social and political debate in many other countries. Although protecting personal privacy and intellectual property on the Internet are now in the spotlight, there are other pressing ethical issues raised by the widespread use of information systems. They include establishing accountability for the consequences of information systems, setting standards to safeguard system quality that protect the safety of the individual and society, and preserving values and institutions considered essential to the quality of life in an information society. This chapter describes these issues and suggests guidelines for dealing with these questions, with special attention to the ethical challenges posed by the Internet. 1 Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems Ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behavior. Information technology and 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, telephone, and 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. When using information systems, it is essential to ask, what is the ethical and socially responsible course of action? Figure 5-1 The relationship between ethical, social, and political issues in an information society. The introduction of new information technology has a ripple effect, raising new ethical, social, and political issues that must be dealt with on the individual, social, and political levels. These issues have five moral dimensions: information rights and obligations, property rights and obligations, system quality, quality of life, and accountability and control. Moral Dimensions of the Information Age Major ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems include the following moral dimensions: Information Rights - The rights that individuals and organizations have with respect to information that pertains to themselves. 2 1. Information rights and obligations: What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to information about themselves? What can they protect? What obligations do individuals and organizations have concerning this information? 2. Property rights: How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society in which tracing and accounting for ownership is difficult, and ignoring such property rights is so easy? 3. Accountability and control: Who can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm done to individual and collective information and property rights? 4. System quality: What standards of data and system quality should we demand to protect individual rights and the safety of society? 5. Quality of life: What values should be preserved in information- and knowledge based society? What institutions should we protect from violation? What cultural values and practices are supported by the new information technology? Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues Ethical issues long preceded information technology—they are the abiding concerns of free societies everywhere. Nevertheless, information technology has heightened ethical concerns, put stress on existing social arrangements, and made existing laws obsolete or severely crippled. There are four key technological trends responsible for these ethical stresses and they are summarized in Table 5-1. The doubling of computing power every 18 months has made it possible for most organizations to use information systems for their core production processes. As a result, our dependence on systems and our vulnerability to system errors and poor data quality have increased. Social rules and laws have not yet adjusted to this dependence. Standards for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of information systems are not universally accepted or enforced. Advances in data storage techniques and rapidly declining storage costs have been responsible for the multiplying databases on individuals—employees, customers, and potential customers—maintained by private and public organizations. These advances in data storage have made the routine violation of individual privacy both cheap and effective. Already massive data storage systems are cheap enough for regional and even local retailing firms to use in identifying 3 customers. Advances in data analysis techniques for large pools of data are a third technological trend that heightens ethical concerns, because they enable companies to find out much detailed personal information about individuals. With contemporary information systems technology, companies can assemble and combine the myriad pieces of information stored on you by computers much more easily than in the past. 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, and local, state, and federal government records (including court and police records). 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, hundreds of Web sites allow DoubleClick www.doubleclick.net, 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 detailed dossier of a person’s spending and computing habits on the Web that can be sold to companies to help them target their Web ads more precisely. Profiling - The use of computers to combine data from multiple sources and create electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals. Last, advances in networking, including the Internet, promise to reduce greatly the costs of moving and accessing large quantities of data, and open the possibility of mining large pools of data remotely using small desktop machines, permitting an invasion of privacy on a scale and precision heretofore unimaginable. The development of global digital-superhighway communication networks widely available to individuals and businesses poses many ethical and social concerns. Who will account for the flow of information over these networks? Will you be able to trace information collected about you? What will these networks do to the traditional relationships between family, work, and leisure? How will traditional job designs be altered when millions of “employees” become subcontractors using mobile offices for which they themselves must pay? 4 Credit card purchases can make personal information available to market researchers, telephone marketers, and direct mail companies. Advances in information technology facilitate the invasion of privacy. Ethics in an Information Society Ethical decisions draw on the concepts of responsibility, accountability, liability, and due process. Responsibility means accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations of one's decisions. Accountability consists of the mechanisms for accessing responsibility for decisions made and actions taken. Liability refers to the existence of laws that permit individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations. Due process requires that laws are known and understood by all, and that individuals can appeal to higher authorities to ensure laws were properly applied. The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems There are ethical, social, and political levels of analysis for each of the five moral dimensions of information systems. Information rights include protection of privacy, the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals, organizations, or the state. Most American and European privacy law is based on the principles of Fair Information Practices (FIP) set forth in 1973 to govern the collection and use of information about individuals. An individual has an interest in the information gathered about him or her and the record may not be used to support other activities without the individual's consent. European privacy protection is much more stringent than in the United States. The European Directive on Data Protection requires companies to inform people when they collect information about them and to disclose how it will be stored and used. EU member nations cannot transfer personal data to countries such as the United States that don't have similar privacy protection regulations. Unfortunately, most of the computer transactions about individuals occurring today are not protected by existing privacy legislation. The Internet poses new challenges to the protection of individual privacy because information can easily be monitored, captured and stored as it passes through its network of computer systems. Companies can record a user's on-line activities, such as what files were accessed or which Web sites were visited. Web sites can learn the identity of their visitors if the visitors voluntarily register at the site or they can capture information about visitors without their knowledge using "cookie" technology. Cookies are tiny files deposited on a computer hard drive when a user visits certain Web sites. Cookies identify the visitor's Web browser software and track visits to the Web site. Some companies are also 5 using Web bugs, which are tiny graphic files embedded into e-mail messages and Web pages to monitor who is reading the e-mail message or Web page. Both the U.S. government and industry groups have developed guidelines for Web site privacy, but additional legislation and technologies may also be required for privacy protection over the Internet. Both opt-in and optout models for informed consent are being considered. Figure 5-3. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a standard for communicating a Web site’s privacy policy to Internet users to help them select the level of privacy they wish to maintain when interacting with the Web site. Figure 5-3 How cookies can identify Web visitors. Cookies are written by a Web site on a visitor’s hard drive. When the visitor 6 returns to that Web site, the Web server requests the ID number from the cookie and uses it to access the data stored by that server on that visitor. The Web site can then use these data to display personalized information. Organizations can collect e-mail addresses to send out thousands and even hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mail and electronic messages. This practice is called spamming, and it is growing because it only costs a few cents to send thousands of messages advertising one's wares to Internet users. Legal Issues Contemporary information systems have severely challenged existing law and social practices protecting intellectual property, which is the intangible property created by individuals or corporations that are subject to protections under trade secret, copyright, and patent law. A trade secret is an intellectual work product used for a business practice that can be classified as belonging to that business, provided it is not based on information in the public domain. Copyright is a statutory grant which protects creators of intellectual property against copying by others for a period of 28 years. A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind the invention for 20 years. Information System software can be so easily copied, altered or transmitted, that it is difficult to protect with existing intellectual property safeguards. Illegal copying of software is rampant worldwide. While protecting against copying of software program code, copyright protection can't prevent another person from using the underlying ideas behind a piece of software and developing software that follows the same concepts. Very little software has received patent protection, which does protect the underlying ideas behind software, because the software must pass very stringent criteria concerning the originality and novelty of those ideas. The Internet makes it even easier to copy intellectual property and transmit it freely around the world. New information technologies are also challenging existing liability law and social practices for holding individuals and institutions accountable. A producer of computer software that is part of a machine that causes damage can be held liable for damages. However producers of computer software products that are treated like books are not yet considered liable for the harm the software causes. Are individuals and organizations that create, produce and sell information systems software and services morally responsible for the consequences of their use? What is an acceptable level of system quality and reliability when most software can never be 100% error free? Both of these questions remain open issues. The negative social costs of introducing new information technologies are beginning to mount. By creating more efficient organizations, information systems threaten to eliminate many management and clerical jobs. Many organizations have heightened their vulnerability to natural disasters, power outages, computer crime, computer abuse, and computer viruses because they are so dependent on computers. Computer crime (the commission of illegal acts through the use of a computer against a computer system) and computer abuse (the commission of acts involving a computer that may not be illegal but are considered unethical) are primarily committed by people inside the organization. Information systems enable some companies to create a "do anything anywhere" work environment that erodes the traditional boundaries between work and family life, lessening the time individuals can devote to their families and personal lives. 7 Information technology may help intensify the cleavage between rich and poor because information, knowledge, and access to computers are inequitable distributed in the first place. Finally, computers may be responsible for the mounting incidence of repetitive stress injury (RSI) and occupational illness such as computer vision syndrome and technostress. For each of the five moral dimensions, corporations should develop an ethics policy statement to assist individuals and to encourage correct decisions. 1. To protect individual information rights, companies should spell out corporate privacy and due process policies. 2. To protect property rights, management should clarify how the corporation will treat property rights of software owners. 3. To promote accountability and control, firms should clarify who is responsible and accountable for information. 4. To promote system quality, companies should identify methodologies and quality standards to achieve. 5. To enhance quality of life, firms should identify corporate policies on family, computer crime, decision making, vulnerability, job loss, and health risks. Technical Solutions In addition to legislation, new technologies are being developed to protect user privacy during interactions with Web sites. Many of these tools are used for encrypting e-mail, for making email or Web surfing activities appear anonymous, or for preventing user computers from accepting “cookies.” Table 5-4 describes some of these tools. Interest is now growing in 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 8 comparing that policy to the user’s preferences or to other standards such as the FTC’s new 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. Ethical Issues The ethical privacy issue in this information age is as follows: Under what conditions should I (you) invade the privacy of others? What legitimates intruding into others’ lives through unobtrusive surveillance, through market research, or by whatever means? Do we have to inform people that we are eavesdropping? Do we have to inform people that we are using credit history information for employment screening purposes? Social Issues The social issue of privacy concerns the development of “expectations of privacy” or privacy norms, as well as public attitudes. In what areas of life should we as a society encourage people to think they are in “private territory” as opposed to public view? For instance, should we as a society encourage people to develop expectations of privacy when using electronic mail, cellular telephones, bulletin boards, the postal system, the workplace, or the street? Should expectations of privacy be extended to criminal conspirators? Political Issues The political issue of privacy concerns the development of statutes that govern the relations between record keepers and individuals. Should we permit the FBI to monitor e-mail at will in order to apprehend suspected criminals and terrorists (see the chapter ending case study). To what extent should e-commerce sites and other businesses be allowed to maintain personal data about individuals? Property Rights: Intellectual Property Contemporary information systems have severely challenged existing laws and social practices that protect private intellectual property. Intellectual property is considered to be intangible property created by individuals or corporations. Information technology has made it difficult to protect intellectual property because computerized information can be so easily copied or distributed on networks. Intellectual property is subject to a variety of protections under three different legal traditions: trade secret, copyright, and patent law. Intellectual Property - Intangible property created by individuals or corporations that is subject to protections under trade secret, copyright, and patent law The practice of sending unsolicited e-mail and other electronic communication. 9 Health Risks: RSI, CVS, and Technostress The most important occupational disease today is repetitive stress injury (RSI). RSI occurs when muscle groups are forced through repetitive actions often with high-impact loads (such as tennis) or tens of thousands of repetitions under low-impact loads (such as working at a computer keyboard). The single largest source of RSI is computer keyboards. About 50 million Americans use computers at work. The most common kind of computer-related RSI is carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), in which pressure on the median nerve through the wrist’s bony structure, called a “carpal tunnel,” produces pain. The pressure is caused by constant repetition of keystrokes: In a single shift, a word processor may perform 23,000 keystrokes. Symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome include numbness, shooting pain, inability to grasp objects, and tingling. Millions of workers have been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) - Type of RSI in which pressure on the median nerve through the wrist’s bony carpal tunnel structure produces pain. RSI is avoidable. Designing workstations for a neutral wrist position (using a wrist rest to support the wrist), proper monitor stands, and footrests all contribute to proper posture and reduced RSI. New, ergonomically correct keyboards are also an option, although their effectiveness has yet to be clearly established. These measures should be backed by frequent rest breaks, rotation of employees to different jobs, and movement toward voice or scanner data entry. RSI is not the only occupational illness computers cause. Back and neck pain, leg stress, and foot 10 pain also result from poor ergonomic designs of workstations. Computer vision syndrome (CVS) refers to any eyestrain condition related to computer display screen use. Its symptoms, usually temporary, include headaches, blurred vision, and dry and irritated eyes. The newest computer-related malady is technostress, which is stress induced by computer use. Its symptoms include aggravation, hostility toward humans, impatience, and fatigue. The problem according to experts is that humans working continuously with computers come to expect other humans and human institutions to behave like computers, providing instant response, attentiveness, and an absence of emotion. Computer-intense workers are aggravated when put on hold during phone calls and become incensed or alarmed when their PCs take a few seconds longer to perform a task. Technostress is thought to be related to high levels of job turnover in the computer industry, high levels of early retirement from computer-intense occupations, and elevated levels of drug and alcohol abuse. The incidence of technostress is not known but is thought to be in the millions in the United States and growing rapidly. Computer-related jobs now top the list of stressful occupations based on health statistics in several industrialized countries. Repetitive stress injury (RSI) is the leading occupational disease today. The single largest cause of RSI is computer keyboard work. To date the role of radiation from computer display screens in occupational disease has not been proved. Video display terminals (VDTs) emit nonionizing electric and magnetic fields at low frequencies. These rays enter the body and have unknown effects on enzymes, molecules, chromosomes, and cell membranes. Long-term studies are investigating low-level electromagnetic fields and birth defects, stress, low birth weight, and other diseases. All manufacturers have reduced display screen emissions since the early 1980s, and European countries such as Sweden have adopted stiff radiation emission standards. The computer has become a part of our lives—personally as well as socially, culturally, and politically. It is unlikely that the issues and our choices will become easier as information technology continues to transform our world. The growth of the Internet and the information economy suggests that all the ethical and social issues we have described will be heightened further as we move into the first digital century. Source: Managing the Digital Firm by Laudon & Laudon 11