Chapter 4
Ethical and Social Issues
in Information Systems
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Learning Objectives
•
4-1 What ethical, social, and political issues are raised by information systems?
•
4-2 What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical decisions?
•
4-3 Why do contemporary information systems technology and the Internet pose
challenges to the protection of individual privacy and intellectual property?
•
4-4 How have information systems affected laws for establishing accountability, liability,
and the quality of everyday life?
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Video Cases
• Case 1: What Net Neutrality Means for You
• Case 2: Facebook and Google Privacy: What
Privacy?
• Case 3: United States v. Terrorism: Data Mining
for Terrorists and Innocents
• Instructional Video: Viktor Mayer Scöhnberger on
the Right to Be Forgotten
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The Dark Side of Big Data (1 of 2)
• Problem
– Opportunities from new technology
– Undeveloped legal environment
• Solutions
– Develop big data strategy
– Develop privacy policies
– Develop big data predictive models
– Develop big data mining technology
– Develop big data analytics tools and predictive modeling systems
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The Dark Side of Big Data (2 of 2)
• Organizations like Progressive and Deloitte
Consulting LLP use predictive modeling to identify
individual customers that fit risk or vulnerability
profiles
• Demonstrates how technological innovations can
be a double-edged sword
• Illustrates the ability of IT systems to support
decision making
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Content Pirates Sail the Web
• Problem: Pirated content costs the U.S.
economy $58 billion a year, including lost
jobs and taxes.
• Solutions: Search engine algorithms to
prevent pirated content appearing on search
engines
• Crawlers find pirated content and notify
content users.
• New products and services to compete with
the appeal of pirated content
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What Ethical, Social, and Political Issues
Are Raised by Information Systems? (1 of 2)
• Recent cases of failed ethical judgment in
business
– General Motors, Barclay’s Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Takata
Corporation
– In many, information systems used to bury (hide /conceal)
decisions from public scrutiny
• Ethics
– Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free
moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors
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What Ethical, Social, and Political Issues
Are Raised by Information Systems? (2 of 2)
• 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
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A Model for Thinking about Ethical, Social,
and Political Issues.
• Society as a calm pond
• IT as 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
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Figure 4.1: The Relationship Between
Ethical, Social, and Political Issues in an
Information Society
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Five Moral Dimensions of the
Information Age
• Information rights and obligations
• Property rights and obligations
• Accountability and control
• System quality
• Quality of life
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Key Technology Trends that Raise Ethical
Issues
• Computing power doubles every 18 months
• Data storage costs rapidly decline
• Data analysis advances
• Networking advances
• Mobile device growth impact
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Advances in Data Analysis Techniques
• Profiling
– Combining data from multiple sources to create dossiers of
detailed information on individuals
• Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA)
– Combining data from multiple sources to find obscure hidden
connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists
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Figure 4.2: Nonobvious Relationship
Awareness (NORA)
NORA technology
can take information
about people from
disparate sources and
find obscure,
nonobvious
relationships. It might
discover, for example,
that an applicant for a
job at a casino shares a
telephone number with
a known criminal and
issue an alert to the
hiring manager.
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Basic Concepts: Responsibility,
Accountability, and Liability
• 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
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Ethical Analysis
• Five-step process for ethical analysis
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.
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Candidate Ethical Principles (1 of 3)
• Golden Rule
– Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
– Putting yourself in the place of others, and thinking of yourself as
the object of the decision, can help you think about fairness in
decision making.
• Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative
– If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for
anyone
– Ask yourself, “If everyone did this, could the organization, or
society, survive?”
• Descartes’ Rule of Change
– If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all
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Candidate Ethical Principles (2 of 3)
• Utilitarian Principle
– Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value
(utilitarian principle). This rule assumes you can prioritize values
in a rank order and understand the consequences of various
courses of action.
• Risk Aversion Principle
– Take the action that produces the least harm or 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). Avoid actions which have
extremely high failure costs; focus on reducing the probability of
accidents occurring.
• Ethical “No Free Lunch” Rule
– Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned
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by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise
Candidate Ethical Principles (3 of 3)
• Ethical “No Free Lunch” Rule
– Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned
by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise.
– (This is the ethical no-free lunch rule.) If something someone
else has created is useful to you, it has value, and you should
assume the creator wants compensation for this work.
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Professional Codes of Conduct
• Promulgated (Publicized / Spread) by associations
of professionals
– American Medical Association (AMA)
– American Bar Association (ABA)
– Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
– In Pakistan….
• Promises by professions to regulate themselves in
the general interest of society
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Real-world Ethical Dilemmas
• One set of interests pitted (rough/bumpy) against
another
• Examples
– Monitoring employees: Right of company to maximize productivity
of workers versus workers right to use Internet for short personal
tasks
– Facebook monitors users and sells information to advertisers
and app developers
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Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom
in the Internet Age (1 of 3)
• Privacy
– 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
• Pakistan….
• In the United States, privacy protected by:
– First Amendment (freedom of speech and association)
– Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)
– Additional federal statues (e.g., Privacy Act of 1974)
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Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom
in the Internet Age (2 of 3)
• Fair information practices
– Set of principles governing the collection and use of
information
Basis of most U.S. and European privacy laws
– Used to drive changes in privacy legislation
COPPA
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
HIPAA
Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011 in U.S.A.
In Pakistan such legislation is needs to be made
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Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom
in the Internet Age (3 of 3)
• FTC FIP principles
– Notice/awareness (core principle)
– Choice/consent (core principle)
– Access/participation
– Security
– Enforcement
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European Directive on Data Protection:
• Use of data requires informed consent of
customer
• EU member nations cannot transfer personal data
to countries without similar privacy protection
• Stricter enforcements under consideration:
– Right of access
– Right to be forgotten
• Safe harbor framework
• Edward Snowden
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Interactive Session: Management
Edward Snowden: Traitor or Protector of Privacy?
Read the Interactive Session and discuss the following questions
• Perform an ethical analysis of the PRISM program and
NSA surveillance activities? What is the ethical
dilemma presented by this case?
• Do you think the NSA should be allowed to continue
its electronic surveillance programs? Why or why
not?
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Internet Challenges to Privacy (1 of 2)
• Cookies
– Identify browser and track visits to site
– Super cookies (Flash cookies)
• Web beacons (web bugs)
– Tiny graphics embedded in e-mails and web pages
– Monitor who is reading e-mail message or visiting site
• Spyware
– Surreptitiously installed on user’s computer
– May transmit user’s keystrokes or display unwanted ads
• Google services and behavioral targeting
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Internet Challenges to Privacy (2 of 2)
• The United States allows businesses to gather
transaction information and use this for other
marketing purposes.
• Opt-out vs. opt-in model
• Online industry promotes self-regulation over
privacy legislation.
– Complex/ambiguous privacy statements
– Opt-out models selected over opt-in
– Online “seals” of privacy principles
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Figure 4.3: How Cookies Identify Web
Visitors
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Technical Solutions
• Solutions include:
– E-mail encryption
– Anonymity tools
– Anti-spyware tools
• Overall, technical solutions have failed to protect
users from being tracked from one site to another
– Browser features
“Private” browsing
“Do not track” options
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Property Rights: Intellectual Property
• Intellectual property
– Intangible property of any kind created by individuals or
corporations
• Three main 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
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Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights
• Digital media different from physical media
– Ease of replication
– Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)
– Ease of alteration
– Compactness
– Difficulties in establishing uniqueness
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
– Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based
protections of copyrighted materials
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Computer-Related Liability Problems
• If software fails, who is responsible?
– If seen as part of a machine that injures or harms, software
producer and operator may be liable.
– If seen as similar to book, difficult to hold author/publisher
responsible.
– If seen as a service? Would this be similar to telephone systems
not being liable for transmitted messages?
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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)
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Quality of Life: Equity, Access, Boundaries (1
of 3)
• Negative social consequences of systems
• Balancing power: center versus periphery
• Rapidity of change: reduced response time to
competition
• Maintaining boundaries: family, work, and leisure
• Dependence and vulnerability
• Computer crime and abuse
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Quality of Life: Equity, Access, Boundaries (2
of 3)
• Computer crime and abuse
– Computer crime
– Computer abuse
– Spam
– CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
• Employment
– Trickle-down technology
– Reengineering job loss
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Quality of Life: Equity, Access, Boundaries (3
of 3)
• Equity and access
– The digital divide
• Health risks
– Repetitive stress injury (RSI)
– Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS)
– Computer vision syndrome (CVS)
– Technostress
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Interactive Session: Technology:
Volkswagen Pollutes Its Reputation with
Software to Cheat Emissions Testing
• Class discussion
– Does the Volkswagen emission cheating crisis pose an ethical
dilemma? Why or why not? If so, who are the stakeholders?
– Describe the role of management, organization, and technology
factors in creating VW’s software cheating problem. To what
extent was management responsible? Explain your answer.
– Should all software-controlling machines be available for public
inspection? Why or why not?
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Interactive Session: Organizations: Are We
Relying Too Much on Computers to Think
for Us?
• Class discussion
– Identify the problem described in this case study. In what sense is
it an ethical dilemma?
– Should more tasks be automated? Why or why not? Explain your
answer.
– Can the problem of automation reducing cognitive skills be
solved? Explain your answer.
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