chapter 4

UNDERSTANDING ETHICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES RELATED TO SYSTEMS

The past few years have witnessed ethically challenging periods for global business as some senior and middle managers demonstrate failed ethical judgment leading to the collapsed of many organization.

Ø  Recent cases of failed ethical judgment in business

    -Lehman Brothers, Mineral management service, Pfizer,

Ethics:

Is the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors. The development in which firms are encouraged to cooperate with prosecutors to reduce charges against the entire firm for obstructing investigation require managers to decide for themselves what constitute proper legal and ethical conduct.

 

Information system and ethics

Information system raised new ethical questions for both individuals and society as they create opportunity for:

1. intense social change, threatening existing distribution of power, money right and obligation.
2. New kind of crime - Information technology can be used to achieve social progress like other technologies but can also be used to commit crime and threaten cherished social values.

Models for thinking about Ethical, Social and Political Issues

• Society as a calm pond
• Information technology as a rock in to the pond, creating ripples of new situation not covered by old rules
• Social and political institutions can not respond overnight to these ripples as it may take years develop etiquette, expectation, laws.

Five (5) Moral Dimensions of Information Age

1. Information right and obligation: 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 Technological Trend That Raise Ethical Issues
- Doubling of computing power

• More organizations depend on system for critical operations

-Rapidly declining data storage cost

• Organizations can maintain easily detailed database on individual

-Networking advances and the internet

• Copying data from one location to another and accessing personal data from a remote location is much easier.

-Advance in data analysis techniques

• Vast quantities of data gathered on individual for:

          << Profiling: involve combining data from multiple sources to create dossiers of detailed on information on individuals. Such information can be used by organization to target their marketing companies.

          << Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) : the technology combine data from multiple sources to find obscure connections that might help find criminals or terrorist.


 

ETHICS IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY

Basic Concept For Ethical Analysis:

• Responsibility: Involves accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for the decisions you make. Ethical choices are made by individuals who are responsible for the consequences of their actions.
• Accountability: Is a mechanisms put in place to identify responsible parties. In an institution in which it is impossible to find out who took an action will be incapable of ethical analysis
• Liability: Is a body of law which permits individual and firms to recover damage done to them by actors, organization and systems.
• Due process: Laws known and understood with an ability to appeal to higher authority to ensure that the laws are applied correctly.

 

Five Steps Process of Ethical Analysis

1. Identify and clearly describe the fact: Find out who did what to whom and when, where and how
2. Defind the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved: Ethical, social, and political issues always reference higher value in which parties in a dispute claim to pursue. Typical ethical issues involve two opposing course of action that support worthwhile values.
3. Identify stakeholders: stakeholder groups must be identify and find out what they want as they have interest in the outcome and have also invested in the situation.
4. Identify reasonable option that you can take: Find out available option that can help arrive at good ethical solution.
5. Identify the consequence of your option: Some options may be ethically correct but disastrous from other point of view. Others may work in one situation but not in other similar instances.

 

Six Candidate Ethical Principle

This are principles that can be used to make decision after ethical analysis. They include:

1. Golden rule: Do unto other as you want them do unto you. This require putting one self in the place of others and thinking of one self as the object of the decision ensure fairness in decision making.
2. Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative: State that if an action is not right for everyone to take, then is right for anyone.
3. Descartes' Rule of Change: this rule also state that an action which can not be taken repeatedly, is not right to take at all as such action may bring a change which is acceptable now but when repeated bring unacceptable change.
4. Utilitarian Principle: Take action that achieves the higher greater value. The principle assume prioritizing value in rank order and understand the consequences of each course of action.
5. Risk Aversion Principle: The principle requires action that produce least harm or least potential cost to be taken.
6. Ethical "No free lunch" rule: State that something created by someone which is useful to you, has value and you should assume the creator want compensation for this work.

 

Professional Code of Ethics

Professional Code of conduct are promulgated by professional bodies to regulate themselves in the general interest of society. For instance, such professional code may be put in place to avoid harm to others, honoring property right and respecting privacy. Examples of such professional bodies are AMA, ABA, AITP, ACM

Some Real-World Ethical Dilemma

Information systems have created new ethical dilemmas in which one set of interests is pitted against another. For example, while many companies are using information technology to reduce the sizes of their workforces, many workers are also loosing their jobs as a result. 

 

Moral Dimension of Information System

Privacy and Freedom:

 Privacy: Privacy is the claim of individual to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individual  or organization including the state. claim of privacy is also involve in the work place as workers are subject to electronic and other form high-tech surveillance. Information technology threaten privacy claim by making invasion of privacy cheap, profitable and effective.

Fair information practices(FIP)
Is a set principles governing the collection and use of information. FIP principles are base on mutuality of interest between record holder and individual. In 1998 the original FIP was restated and extended by FTC to provide guidelines  for protecting online privacy.
The FTC's FIP principles are used to drive changes in the privacy legislation. Example, children online privacy protection Act (COPPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

FTC FIP Principles
Notice / awareness
Choice / consent
Access / Participation
Security
Enforcement

Europe Directive On Data Protection
the European commission directive on data protection require companies to inform people when they collect information them and disclose how it will be store and used. The directive also require that customers must provide their inform consent before any company can legally used data about them, and they have the right to access that information, correct it and request that no further data be collected.
The commission also direct it member nations not to transfer personal data to countries with no similar privacy protection regulation. However, the U.S department of commence worked with the European commission to develop a safe harbor framework for U.S firms which allow U.S firms to use personal data from EU countries if the develop privacy protection policies that meet EU standard.   

Internet Challenge To Privacy
internet technology has poses new challenge to privacy because as information is sent over the internet many computer system are capable of monitoring, capture or store communication. As a result information about people is collected as they visit website and web pages or request for free service online. This has made it popular for companies to use the tools outline below to monitor their website and find out who is visiting the site.
   1. Cookies: they are small files downloaded by a web site to a computer hard drive when the user visit the website.
   2. Web beacons: is a tiny graphics embedded in e-mail and web pages to monitor who is reading. they are place on the web site by third party firm for a fee.
   3. Spyware: They piggyback on large application to install themselves secretly on internet users computer. They display unwanted advertisement and other unsolicited material to users.

Property Right

Intellectual Property: Is an intangible property of any kind created by individual or organization. Information technology has made it difficult to protect it because computerize information can easily be copied and distributed over the internet.

Three Ways To Protect Intellectual Property

• Trade Secret: Is an intellectual work or product belonging to a business, which is not in the public domain. Trade secret laws grant monopoly on the idea behind the work or product.
• Copyright: Is a statutory grant that protect intellectual property of an author from being copied by others during his life time, plus 70 years. Copyright protect against coping of entire program or part.
• Patent: Involves granting an creator of an invention an exclusive monopoly on idea behind the invention for 20 years. Patent law unsure the inventors of new machines and devices receive full financial rewards on their labor.

Challenges To Intellectual Property Right

• Ease of replication
• Ease of transmission
• Compactness
• Difficult in establishing uniqueness

Accountability, liability, control

Existing liability laws and social practices for holding individual and organization accountable are been challenge by new information technology because is difficult to associate injury suffered using information system to a particular person.

Computer Related liability Problem
If a software fails, who is responsible

• If is seen as part of a machine that injures or harms, then the software producer or operator may be liable.
• If seen as similar to a book, difficult to hold author / publisher responsible

System Quality

an acceptable, technologically feasible system can not be without imperfection though software companies debug their product before releasing it into the market. the companies ship buggy product because the time and cost of fixing all minor errors would prevent these product from ever been released. However, individual and organization that produce such product may be held responsible for avoidable and foreseeable consequence which the owe a duty to perceive and correct.

Three Sources Of Poor System Performance

• Software bugs / errors
• Hardware or facility failure cause by natural causes
• Poor input data quality

Quality Of Life: Equity, Access And Boundaries

the negative social cost of information technology is beginning to mount along with the power of technology. these negative social consequences are not in violation to individual right or property but can be extremely harmful for individual society and political institution .These negative social consequences are:

1. Rapidity Of change: Businesses which may not have enough time and resources to respond to global competition, may be wipeout in years ahead leading to employees loosing their job
2. Maintaining boundaries: Computing and internet usage have weakened the traditional boundary that separate work from family and leisure. this is made possible through the use of telecommuting, nomad computing and do anything anywhere computing environment.
3. Dependence and Vulnerability: Today both public and private organization (businesses, government, schools, churches etc.) depend more on computer system and are vulnerable if these system fails.
4. Computer Crime and Abuse: computer crime is the commission illegal act through the use of computer. Computer may be an object of crime (destroying a company computer files). However, computer abuse is the commission f act involving a computer that may not be illegal but are considered unethical.
5. Employment: Work redesigning as a result of information technology may result in job losses by Mid-Level managers and clerical workers
6. Equity And Access: Certain ethnic and income group are less likely to have internet access due to social, economic and cultural gaps that exist.