S U MAYA BI N TA J U N N AT L E CT U RE R G RE E N BU S I N E SS S CH O O L Ethics and Information Systems
•Ethics: Ethics are the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors. •Information systems and ethics: 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 and new kinds of crime those took place. Five Moral Dimensions of Information Age
The major ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems include the following moral dimensions: 1.Information rights and obligations: it means to find the answer of the question, What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect? 2. 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? 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 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? Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues There are four key technological trends responsible for these ethical stresses and they are: 1. Doubling of computer power: it is required because more organizations depend on computer systems for critical operations 2. Rapidly declining data storage costs: As a result, organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals 3. Networking advances and the Internet: It has helped to copy data from one location to another and accessing personal data from remote locations is much easier. 4. Advances in data analysis techniques: Companies can analyze vast quantities of data gathered on individuals for: Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues (Cont’d) • Profiling: The use of computers to combine data from multiple sources and create electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals is called profiling. Example- DoubleClick own by google.
• Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA): It 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. Basic Concepts for Ethical Analysis Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals who are responsible for the consequences of their actions. The basic concepts for ethical Analysis are: 1. Responsibility: Responsibility is a key element of ethical action. Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for the decisions you make. 2. Accountability: Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions: It means that mechanisms are in place to determine who took responsible action, and who is responsible. Systems and institutions in which it is impossible to find out who took what action are inherently incapable of ethical analysis or ethical action. 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 Steps of Ethical Analysis Process When we are confronted with a situation that seems to present ethical issues, then we need to follow the following 5 steps to analyze it: 1. Identify and describe clearly the facts: It means to find out who did what to whom, and where, when, and how. It also helps to get the opposing parties involved in an ethical dilemma to agree on the facts. 2. 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. Typically, an ethical issue involves a dilemma: two diametrically opposed courses of action that support worthwhile values. 5 Steps of Ethical Analysis Process 3. Identify the stakeholders: Every ethical, social, and political issue has stakeholders. It means the 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. 4. Identify the options that you can reasonably take: We may find that none of the options satisfy all the interests involved, but that some options do a better job than others. Sometimes arriving at a good or ethical solution may not always be a balancing of consequences to stakeholders. 5. Identify the potential consequences of your options: Some options may be ethically correct but disastrous from other points of view. Candidate Ethical Principles Although we are the only one who can decide which among many ethical principles you will follow, and how you will prioritize them, it is helpful to consider some ethical principles with deep roots in many cultures that have survived throughout recorded history: 1. the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 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. 2. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone. 3. Descartes’ rule of change: If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all. This is the slippery-slope rule: 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. Candidate Ethical Principles (Cont’d) 4. Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value . This rule assumes you can prioritize values in a rank order and understand the consequences of various courses of action. 5. Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that produces the least harm or least potential cost. Some actions have extremely high failure costs of very low probability (e.g., building a nuclear generating facility in an urban area) or extremely high failure costs of moderate probability (speeding and automobile accidents). 6. Ethical “no free lunch” Rule: Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. If something someone else has created is useful to you, it has value, and you should assume the creator wants compensation for this work. Actions that do not easily pass these rules deserve close attention and a great deal of caution. Information Rights •Privacy: Privacy is the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals, organizations, or state. Claim to be able to control information about yourself. •Internet Challenges to Privacy: 1. Cookies: Tiny files downloaded by Web site to visitor’s hard drive to help identify visitor’s browser and track visits to site. It allow Web sites to develop profiles on visitors. 2. Web beacons/bugs: Tiny graphics embedded in e-mail and Web pages to monitor who is reading message 3. Spyware: 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 also report the user’s movements on the Internet to other computers. Information Rights(Cont’d) •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. The individual has an interest in engaging in a transaction, and the record keeper—usually a business or government agency-requires information about the individual to support the transaction. Once information is gathered, the individual maintains an interest in the record, and the record may not be used to support other activities without the individual’s consent. PROPERTY RIGHTS: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY •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: 1. Trade Secrets: Any intellectual work product—a formula, device, pattern, or compilation of data—used for a business purpose can be classified as a trade secret, provided it is not based on information in the public domain. Protections for trade secrets vary from state to state. In general, trade secret laws grant a monopoly on the ideas behind a work product, but it can be a very tenuous monopoly. PROPERTY RIGHTS: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 2. 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. 3. 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. Thank You.
