4.

ethical
4.1 What ethical, social, and political issues are raised by information systems?
1. 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.

2. Five moral dimensions of the information age

a) Information rights and obligations. What information rights do individuals and
organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect?
b) 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?
c) Accountability and control. Who can and will be held accountable and liable for
the harm done to individual and collective information and property rights?
d) System quality. What standards of data and system quality should we demand
to protect individual rights and the safety of society
e) Quality of life. What values should be preserved in an information- and
knowledge-based society? Which institutions should we protect from violation?
Which cultural values and practices are supported by the new information
technology?

3. Profiling - The use of computers to combine data from multiple sources and create
electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals.
4. Nonobvious relationships awareness (NORA) - 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.
4.2 What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical decisions?
1. Responsibility - Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and
obligations for the decisions you make.
2. Accountability - means that mechanisms are in place to determine who took
responsible action, and who is responsible.
3. 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.
4. Due process - 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.

5. Ethical analysis – 5 step process

I. Identify and describe the facts clearly.
II. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved.
III. Identify the stakeholders.
IV. Identify the options that you can reasonably take.
V. Identify the potential consequences of your options.

6. Candidate ethical principles

I. Golden rule - Putting yourself into the place of others and thinking of yourself
as the object of the decision can help you think about fairness in decision
making.
II. Immanuel Kant -If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for
anyone (Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative). Ask yourself, “If everyone
did this, could the organization, or society, survive?”
III. Slippery slope - If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take
at all. An action may bring about a small change now that is acceptable, but if
it is repeated, it would bring unacceptable changes in the long run. In the
vernacular, it might be stated as “once started down a slippery path, you may
not be able to stop.”
IV. Utilitarian principle - Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value.
V. Risk aversion principle - Take the action that produces the least harm or the
least potential cost.
VI. Ethical no free lunch rule - Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible
objects are owned by someone else unless there is a specific declaration
otherwise.

7. Professional code of conduct - Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by

associations of professionals, such as the American Medical Association (AMA), the
American Bar Association (ABA), the Association of Information Technology
Professionals (AITP), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). These
professional groups take responsibility for the partial regulation of their professions by
determining entrance qualifications and competence. Codes of ethics are promises by
professions to regulate themselves in the general interest of society. For example,
avoiding harm to others, honoring property rights (including intellectual property), and
respecting privacy.
4.3 Why do contemporary information systems technology and the Internet pose challenges
to the protection of individual privacy and intellectual property?
1. Privacy - Privacy is the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or
interference from other individuals or organizations, including the state.
2. Fair information practices (FIP) - FIP is a set of principles governing the collection
and use of information about individuals. FIP principles are based on the notion of a
mutuality of interest between the record holder and the individual.
3. Informed consent - consent given with knowledge of all the facts needed to make a
rational decision.
4. Safe harbor - a private, self-regulating policy and enforcement mechanism that meets
the objectives of government regulators and legislation but does not involve
government regulation or enforcement.
5. Cookies - 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.
6. Web beacons - also called Web bugs (or simply “tracking files”), are tiny software
programs that keep a record of users’ online clickstream and report this data back to
whomever owns the tracking file 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.
7. Spyware - Other spyware can secretly install itself on an Internet user’s computer by
piggybacking on larger applications. Once installed, the spyware calls out to Web sites
to send banner ads and other unsolicited material to the user, and it can report the
user’s movements on the Internet to other computers.
8. Opt-out - An opt-out model of informed consent permits the collection of personal
information until the consumer specifically requests that the data not be collected.
9. Opt-in - Privacy advocates would like to see wider use of an opt-in model of informed
consent in which a business is prohibited from collecting any personal information
unless the consumer specifically takes action to approve information collection and
use.
10. 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.
11. Trade secret - Any intellectual work product—a formula, device, pattern, or
compilation of data—used for a business purpose, provided it is not based on
information in the public domain. In general, trade secret laws grant a monopoly on the
ideas behind a work product, but it can be a very tenuous monopoly.
12. Copyright - Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property
from having their work copied by others for any purpose during the life of the author
plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death. For corporate-owned works,
copyright protection lasts for 95 years after their initial creation. Congress has
extended copyright protection to books, periodicals, lectures, dramas, musical
compositions, maps, drawings, artwork of any kind, and motion pictures.
13. Patents - A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an
invention for 20 years. The congressional intent behind patent law was to ensure that
inventors of new machines, devices, or methods receive the full financial and other
rewards of their labor and yet make widespread use of the invention possible by
providing detailed diagrams for those wishing to use the idea under license from the
patent’s owner.
14. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - The DMCA implemented a World
Intellectual Property Organization Treaty that makes it illegal to circumvent technology-
based protections of copyrighted materials.
4.4 How have information systems affected laws for establishing accountability, liability, and
the quality of everyday life?
1. SYSTEM QUALITY: DATA QUALITY AND SYSTEM ERRORS
Three principal sources of poor system performance are (1) software bugs and errors,
(2) hardware or facility failures caused by natural or other causes, and (3) poor input
data quality.
2. Computer crime - Computer crime is the commission of illegal acts through the use
of a computer or against a computer system. Computers or computer systems can be
the object of the crime (destroying a company’s computer center or a company’s
computer files), as well as the instrument of a crime (stealing computer lists by illegally
gaining access to a computer system using a home computer).
3. Computer abuse - Computer abuse is the commission of acts involving a computer
that may not be illegal but that are considered unethical. The popularity of the Internet
and e-mail has turned one form of computer abuse—spamming—into a serious
problem for both individuals and businesses.
4. Spam - Spam is junk e-mail sent by an organization or individual to a mass audience
of Internet users who have expressed no interest in the product or service being
marketed.
5. Digital divide - schools in high-poverty areas less likely to have computers, high-quality
educational technology programs, or Internet access availability for their students.

Health Risks: RSI, CVS, and Technostress

6. RSI - repetitive stress injury (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).
7. CTS - 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 grasp
objects, and tingling.
8. CVS - Computer vision syndrome (CVS) refers to any eyestrain condition related to
display screen use in desktop computers, laptops, e-readers, smartphones, and
handheld video games. CVS affects about 90 percent of people who spend three hours
or more per day at a computer (Beck, 2010).
9. Technostress - stress induced by computer and cell phone use. Its symptoms include
aggravation, hostility toward humans, impatience, and fatigue. According to experts,
humans working continuously with computers come to expect other humans and
human institutions to behave like computers, providing instant responses,
attentiveness, and an absence of emotion.