sim(power point)

Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

•         Analyze the relationships among ethical, social, and political issues that are raised by information systems.

•         Identify the main moral dimensions of an information society and specific principles for conduct that can be used to guide ethical decisions.

•         Evaluate the impact of contemporary information systems and the Internet on the protection of individual privacy and intellectual property.

•         Assess how information systems have affected everyday life.

Does Location Tracking Threaten Privacy?

•         Problem: New opportunities from new technology and need for greater security.

•         Solutions: Redesigning business processes and products to support location monitoring increases sales and security.

•         Deploying GPS and RFID tracking devices with a location tracking database enables location monitoring.

•         Demonstrates IT’s role in creating new opportunities for improved business performance

•         Illustrates how technology can be a double-edged sword by providing benefits such as increased sales and security while compromising privacy.

•         Past five years: One of the most ethically challenged periods in U.S. history

•         Lapses in management ethical and business judgment in a broad spectrum of industries

•         Enron, WorldCom, Merrill Lynch, KMPG, etc.

•         Sub-prime loans and the failure of risk analysis: CitiBank and Societe General

•         Information systems instrumental in many recent frauds

•         Stiffer sentencing guidelines, obstruction charges against firms, mean individual managers must take greater responsibility regarding ethical and legal conduct

•         Ethics

•         Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behavior

•         Information systems and ethics

•         Information systems raise new ethical questions because they create opportunities for:

•         Intense social change, threatening existing distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations

•         New kinds of crime

•         A model for thinking about ethical, social, and political issues

•         Society as a calm pond

•         IT as a rock dropped in pond, creating ripples of new situations not covered by old rules

•         Social and political institutions cannot respond overnight to these ripples—it may take years to develop etiquette, expectations, laws

•         Requires understanding of ethics to make choices in legally gray areas

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.

•         Five moral dimensions of information age

•         Major issues raised by information systems include:

•         Information rights and obligations

•         Property rights and obligations

•         Accountability and control

•         System quality

•         Quality of life

•         Four key technology trends that raise ethical issues

•         Computing power doubles every 18 months

•         Increased reliance on, and vulnerability to, computer systems

•         Data storage costs rapidly declining

•         Multiplying databases on individuals

•         Data analysis advances

•         Greater ability to find detailed personal information on individuals

•         Profiling and nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA)

•         Networking advances and the Internet

•         Enables moving and accessing large quantities of personal data

•         Read the Interactive Session: Management, and then discuss the following questions:

•         Do data brokers pose an ethical dilemma? Explain your answer.

•         What are the problems caused by the proliferation of data brokers? What management, organization, and technology factors are responsible for these problems?

•         How effective are existing solutions to these problems?

•         Should the U.S. federal government regulate private data brokers? Why or why not? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

•         Basic concepts form the underpinning of an ethical analysis of information systems and those who manage them

•         Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations for decisions

•         Accountability: Mechanisms for identifying responsible parties

•         Liability: Permits individuals (and firms) to recover damages done to them

•         Due process: Laws are well known and understood, with an ability to appeal to higher authorities

•         Ethical analysis: A five-step process

1.      Identify and clearly describe the facts

2.      Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved

3.      Identify the stakeholders

4.      Identify the options that you can reasonably take

5.      Identify the potential consequences of your options

•         Candidate Ethical Principles

•         Golden Rule

•         Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

•         Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative

•         If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone

•         Descartes' rule of change

•         If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all

•         Candidate Ethical Principles (cont.)

•         Utilitarian Principle

•         Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value

•         Risk Aversion Principle

•         Take the action that produces the least harm or least potential cost

•         Ethical “no free lunch” rule

•         Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise

•         Professional codes of conduct

•         Promulgated by associations of professionals

•         E.g. AMA, ABA, AITP, ACM

•         Promises by professions to regulate themselves in the general interest of society

•         Real-world ethical dilemmas

•         One set of interests pitted against another

•         E.g. Right of company to maximize productivity of workers vs. workers right to use Internet for short personal tasks

•         Information rights and obligations

•         Privacy

•          Claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals, organizations, or the state.

•         The claim to be able to control information about yourself

•         In U.S., privacy protected by:

•         First Amendment (freedom of speech)

•         Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)

•         Additional federal statues

•         Privacy Act of 1974

•         Fair information practices:

•         Set of principles governing the collection and use of information

•         Basis of most U.S. and European privacy laws

•         Based on mutuality of interest between record holder and individual 

•         Restated and extended by FTC in 1998 to provide guidelines for protecting online privacy

•         Used to drive changes in privacy legislation

•         COPPA

•         Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

•         HIPAA

•         FTC FIP principles:

•         Notice/awareness (core principle): Web sites must disclose practices before collecting data

•         Choice/consent (core principle): Consumers must be able to choose how information is used for secondary purposes

•         Access/participation: Consumers must be able to review, contest accuracy of personal data

•         Security: Data collectors must take steps to ensure accuracy, security of personal data

•         Enforcement: Must be mechanism to enforce FIP principles

•         European Directive on Data Protection:

•         Requires companies to inform people when they collect information about them and disclose how it will be stored and used.

•         Requires informed consent of customer (not true in the U.S.)

•         EU member nations cannot transfer personal data to countries without similar privacy protection (e.g. U.S.)

•         U.S. businesses use safe harbor framework

•         Self-regulating policy and enforcement that meets  objectives of government legislation but does not involve government regulation or enforcement.

•         Internet Challenges to Privacy:

•         Cookies

•         Tiny files downloaded by Web site to visitor’s hard drive

•         Identify visitor’s browser and track visits to site

•         Allow Web sites to develop profiles on visitors

•         Web bugs

•         Tiny graphics embedded in e-mail messages and Web pages

•         Designed to monitor who is reading a message and transmitting that  information to another computer on the Internet

•         Spyware

•         Surreptitiously installed on user’s computer

•         May transmit user’s keystrokes or display unwanted ads

•         Technical solutions

•         The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)

•         Allows Web sites to communicate privacy policies to visitor’s Web browser – user

•         User specifies privacy levels desired in browser settings

•         E.g. “medium” level accepts cookies from first-party host sites that have opt-in or opt-out policies but rejects third-party cookies that use personally identifiable information without an opt-in policy.

•         Property Rights: Intellectual Property

•         Intellectual property: Intangible property of any kind created by individuals or corporations

•         Three ways that intellectual property is protected

•         Trade secret: Intellectual work or product belonging to business, not in the public domain

•         Copyright: Statutory grant protecting intellectual property from being copied for the life of the author, plus 70 years

•         Patents: Grants creator of invention an exclusive monopoly on ideas behind invention for 20 years

•         Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights

•         Digital media different from physical media (e.g. books)

•         Ease of replication

•         Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)

•         Difficulty in classifying software

•         Compactness

•         Difficulties in establishing uniqueness

•         Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)

•         Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based protections of copyrighted materials

•         Accountability, Liability, Control

•         Computer-related liability problems

•         If software fails, who is responsible?

•         If seen as a part of a machine that injures or harms, software producer and operator may be liable

•         If seen as similar to a book, difficult to hold software author/publisher responsible

•         What should liability be if software is seen as service? Would this be similar to telephone systems not being liable for transmitted messages (so-called “common carriers”)

•         System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors

•         What is an acceptable, technologically feasible level of system quality?

•         Flawless software is economically unfeasible

•         Three principal sources of poor system performance:

•         Software bugs, errors

•         Hardware or facility failures

•         Poor input data quality (most common source of business system failure)

•         Quality of Life: Negative social consequences of systems

•         Balancing power: Although computing power is decentralizing, key decision-making power remains centralized

•         Rapidity of change: Businesses may not have enough time to respond to global competition

•         Maintaining boundaries: Computing and Internet use lengthens the work-day, infringes on family, personal time

•         Dependence and vulnerability: Public and private organizations ever more dependent on computer systems

•         Read the Interactive Session: Organizations, and then discuss the following questions:

•         Does the use of the Internet by children and teenagers pose an ethical dilemma? Why or why not?

•         Should parents restrict use of the Internet by children or teenagers? Why or why not?

•         Computer crime and abuse

•         Computer crime: Commission of illegal acts through use of compute or against a computer system – computer may be object or instrument of crime

•         Computer abuse: Unethical acts, not illegal

•         Spam: High costs for businesses in dealing with spam

•         Employment: Reengineering work resulting in lost jobs

•         Equity and access – the digital divide: Certain ethnic and income groups in the United States less likely to have computers or Internet access

•         Health risks:

•         Repetitive stress injury (RSI)

•         Largest source is computer keyboards

•         Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS)

•         Computer vision syndrome (CVS)

•         Technostress

•         Role of radiation, screen emissions, low-level electromagnetic fields