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12/5: Ethical & Social Issues in IS
• Define ethics, responsibility, accountability, liability,
due process
• Technology trends that raise ethical issues
• Ethical analysis
• An ethical dilemma to consider
• Four moral dimensions of the information age
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–
–
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Information rights & obligations
Property rights
Accountability & control
System quality
• Computer crime
Definitions
• Ethics: Principles of right & wrong used by free
individuals to make choices in their behavior.
• Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs,
duties, and obligations for one’s decisions.
• Accountability: Ways of assessing responsibility
for decisions made and actions taken.
• Liability: Laws that permit individuals to
recover the damages done to them by others.
• Due process: Laws are known & understood,
and decisions can be appealed to higher
authorities.
Trends raising ethical issues
• Increased dependence on computers
– Companies shut down if their hardware, software, or
networks shut down.
• Multiplying databases
– Remember Infospace.com?
– Profiling: Use of computers to combine data from
multiple sources to crease electronic dossiers of
detailed information on individuals.
– Is this an invasion of privacy?
Ethical Analysis
• Identify & describe clearly the facts.
• Define the conflict or dilemma, identify the
higher-order values involved.
• Identify the stakeholders.
• Identify the options that can be reasonably taken.
• Identify the potential consequences of your
options.
Ethical Perspectives to Consider
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.
• If it’s not right for everyone to do, it’s not right
for anyone.
• If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it’s not
right to take it at all.
• Take the action that achieves the greatest good.
• Take the action that incurs the least potential
cost.
• There’s no free lunch. Everything, unless
specified otherwise, is owned by someone.
An Ethical Dilemma to Consider
• Employee monitoring on the Internet
– Overtime is up at your small insurance company.
– Network analysis shows the following:
– Apply ethical analysis
User
Minutes online
URL visited
Kelly, Chris
45
57
96
www.stltoday.com
www.yahoo.com
www.insuremarket.com
Miller, Bob
112
43
www.travelocity.com
www.sharperimage.com
Talbot, Erin
123
27
73
www.e-trade.com
www.wine.com
www.ebay.com
Four Moral Dimensions of the
Information Age
•
•
•
•
Information rights & obligations
Property rights
Accountability & control
System quality
Information rights & obligations
• Privacy: The claim of individuals to be left
alone, free from surveillance or interference
from others, including the state.
• Fair Information Practices
– Privacy Act of 1974
• Internet practices, cookies, spamming
• Is it legitimate or ethical to keep unobtrusive
surveillance?
Property Rights
• Intellectual property: intangible property created
by individuals or corporations that is subject to
protections under trade secret, copyright, or
patent law.
Property Rights
• Trade secret
©
– Any intellectual work or product used for business
classified as belonging to that business, providing
that it is not based on information in the public
domain.
• Copyright
– Protects creators of intellectual property against
copying by others for any purpose for 28 years.
• Patent law
– Exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an
invention for 17 years.
Software Piracy
• “The unauthorized copying or use of software
for which you have not paid the appropriate
licensing fee”
• Estimate: $11 billion/year lost to piracy
– In early 1990s, Lotus
estimated that half of its
revenue was lost per year
to software piracy
• Estimate: 2 of 5 pieces
of software are pirated
Accountability & Control
• Who is to be held responsible for faulty
computers? Software?
• What are the societal ramifications of doing so?
System quality
• What is an acceptable level of bugs?
• At what point should software be released to
others?
Computer Crime
• “Any illegal activity
using computer
software, data, or
access as the object,
subject, or instrument
of the crime”
Theft: Fraud & Abuse
• Trojan horses: “insertion of false information
into a program to profit from its outcome”
• Data & time bombs: inserting time- or eventtriggered code into programs maliciously
• Salami-slicing: little
bits of theft that add up
• Data diddling: EX:
diverting charges