This document discusses several ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems. It addresses principles of ethics that can guide decisions involving these technologies. Advances in computing power, data storage, analysis, and networking have increased vulnerabilities like privacy violations and intellectual property challenges. Key issues involve information rights and privacy, property rights, accountability and control, system quality, and work-life balance. Guidelines for ethical analysis and decision-making are presented.
This document discusses several ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems. It addresses principles of ethics that can guide decisions involving these technologies. Advances in computing power, data storage, analysis, and networking have increased vulnerabilities like privacy violations and intellectual property challenges. Key issues involve information rights and privacy, property rights, accountability and control, system quality, and work-life balance. Guidelines for ethical analysis and decision-making are presented.
This document discusses several ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems. It addresses principles of ethics that can guide decisions involving these technologies. Advances in computing power, data storage, analysis, and networking have increased vulnerabilities like privacy violations and intellectual property challenges. Key issues involve information rights and privacy, property rights, accountability and control, system quality, and work-life balance. Guidelines for ethical analysis and decision-making are presented.
This document discusses several ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems. It addresses principles of ethics that can guide decisions involving these technologies. Advances in computing power, data storage, analysis, and networking have increased vulnerabilities like privacy violations and intellectual property challenges. Key issues involve information rights and privacy, property rights, accountability and control, system quality, and work-life balance. Guidelines for ethical analysis and decision-making are presented.
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Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems
What ethical, social, and political issues are raised by ?
• What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical decisions? • Why do contemporary technology and the Internet pose challenges to the protection of individual privacy and intellectual property? • How have affected everyday life? Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems
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 . Ethical, social, and political issues are closely linked.
Introduction of new technology has a ripple effect in the
current equilibrium, creating new ethical, social, and political issues that must be dealt with on individual, social, and political levels.
Both social and political institutions require time before
developing new behaviors, rules, and laws The Relationship Between Ethical, Social, and Political Issues in an Information Society
These issues have five moral dimensions:
Information rights and obligations,
Property rights and obligations, System quality, quality of life, and accountability and control. 1. Information rights and obligations. What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect? Eg. (Privacy &Web sites Privacy , Spyware , Cookies )
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? Eg .(trade secret, copyright, and patent law) 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? Eg .(Computer crime , Spam junk e-mail 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? • Repetitive stress injury (RSI) • Computer vision syndrome (CVS) any eyestrain condition related to computer display screen use • Techno stress 7 Four key technology trends have heightened the ethical stresses on existing social arrangements and laws.
1. Computing power has doubled every 18
months allowing growing numbers of organizations to use information systems in their core business processes. This growing dependence on critical systems increases vulnerability to system errors and poor data quality.
2. Advances in data storage techniques have enabled for
the multiplying databases on individuals maintained by private and public organizations - making the violation of individual privacy both cheap and effective. 3. Advances in data analysis techniques enable companies and government agencies use profiling to determine detailed information about individual's habits and tastes and create dossiers of detailed information. Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) is a new data analysis technology that can take data about people from many sources and correlate relationships to find hidden connections to identify potential criminals and terrorists.
4. Advances in networking reduce the costs of moving and
accessing data, permitting privacy invasions on a vast scale. Ethics in an Information Society
Ethical decisions draw on the concepts of:
Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations of one's decisions accountability
Accountability: A feature of systems and social institutions,
accountability means that mechanisms are in place to determine who took responsible action and who is responsible for an action
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
A five-step process can help analyze ethical issues:
(1)Identifying the facts,
(2)Defining the conflict or dilemma and identifying the values involved, (3)Identifying the stakeholders, (4)Identifying options that can be taken, and (5)Identifying potential consequences of actions. Six traditional principles can be used to help forming an ethical decision: 1. The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 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 should not be taken at any time. 4. The Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value. 5. The Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that produces the least harm or least cost. 6. The ethical "no free lunch" rule: All tangible objects are assumed owned by someone else unless specifically declared otherwise. 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 is subject to protections under trade secret, copyright, and patent law.
Digital media and software can be so easily copied, altered,
or transmitted, that it is difficult to protect with existing intellectual property safeguards. Illegal copying of software and music and video files is rampant worldwide Information systems enable 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.
Essential public organizations are ever more dependent on
vulnerable digital systems.
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. Spam is unrequested junk e-mail sent to thousands of Internet users.