Five Moral Dimensions
These moral dimensions are much older than the newly arriving
technologies of IT. These concerns are the concerns that face any democratic
society and have since the inception of democracy. IT has added a new dimension.
- Information Rights and Obligations: What information rights
do individuals and organisations have? What obligations do individuals and
organisations have?
- Property Rights: Intellectual property rights are very important
in today’s knowledge-based economies.
- Accountability and Control: Who has control over information and who is accountable
should any damage be done to an individual or organisation?
- System Quality: What are the standards for data and system quality
required to protect the rights of individuals and the safety of society?
- Quality of Life: What values need to be preserved in the face
of advancing technology? What institutions should be preserved? What positive
cultural practices are supported by new technologies?
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Key Technology Trends
- Computing power doubles every 18 months and this may soon drop
to 12 months. Society has become increasingly dependent upon computers,
this has heightened concern about system failures.
- Data storage has become increasingly cheap and data storage techniques have improved.
This has allowed large amounts of data about individuals and organisations
to be stored. This means that the rights of the individual to privacy can
very easily and cheaply be violated.
- The issue of data storage is compounded by advances in data mining,
allow specific data about individuals that would otherwise unobtainable.
Companies can use data mining techniques to profile the behaviour of individuals
and target them in specific marketing campaigns. Related to improvements
in data mining is the development of data warehousing, in which large
amounts of data residing in more than one database are used.
- Advances in networking, especially the emergence of he Internet,
have made it possible for large amount of data to be moved at little cost
over great distances. This means it is possible to remotely access large
amounts of data, further threatening the rights of the individual.
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Ethics In The Information Society
Key Ethical Concepts
Responsibility: Means accepting the consequences
of your actions and the implications of the decisions you make.
Accountability: This is determined by the
social and institutional mechanisms in place, ensuring that those who bring
about a situation can be held to account for it.
Liability: This is a feature of a political system in which
laws enable individuals and organisations to recover damages done to them.
Due Process: Exists in law-governed societies,
where there is the facility to appeal to a higher authority as laid down by
the law. This ensures that laws are correctly applied.
Ethical Principles
- The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
- Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: If an action is not right
for everyone to take it is not right for one person to take. “If everyone
did this would that be alright?”
- Descarte’s Rule Of Change: If it is not right to take an action repeatedly
it is not right to take it at any time. This is also referred to as the
slippery slope rule.
- Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that achieves the higher or greater
value. The assumption is that you can understand the consequences of actions
and are able to rank possible actions in accord with their outcomes.
- Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that causes the least harm or
has the least bad outcome if things go wrong.
- “No free lunch”: Always assume that everything is owned by someone
else unless there is a specific declaration stating that it is not owned
by anyone else.
These ethical rules can provide a guide to ethical decision
making. Due to the fact that ethical decisions can be complex it is not possible
to have a complete set of rules for all possible situations.
Professional Codes of Conduct
Many professions and professional bodies have codes of
conduct to encourage correct ethical behaviour. Professions may take on special
rights and obligations due to their claims to special knowledge. Doctors and
lawyers are two examples. To help to discourage unscrutable individuals professional
bodies often have strict rules of conduct. In the UK this is the case for
financial advisers.
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The Moral Implications Of Information Systems
Privacy
The European Union (EU) passed the European Directive on
Data Protection in 1998, providing individuals with a right to privacy in
the digital age. The directive requires that companies disclose to individuals
how data about them is stored and how it is used. Individuals have to provide
their consent for the data to collected, may ask that the data be corrected
if it incorrect and request that no further data be collected. All EU countries
are required to implement the directive with their own laws and are restricted
from transferring data to countries that do not have similar laws, such as
the USA.
Although privacy is not protected
to the same degree in the USA with regard to data systems, the right to privacy
is provided in the American constitution. In addition in 1973 the USA introduced
the Fair Information Practices (FIP), a set of principles guiding the use
of data about individuals. This has lead to a number of state and federal
laws.
The Internet presents some specific
challenges to the individuals right to privacy:
- Logging of web site visits.
- Logging of e-mail.
- Spamming.
These intersect with ethic and
political considerations. For example, the government may wish to log web
activities in order to identify and catch certain types of criminals. This
has to weighed against the right of the individual to privacy.
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Intellectual Property Rights
Intellectual property is one of the key business concepts
for modern businesses, especially those in high technology industries like
IT and biotechnology. This can be
processes or inventions developed by individuals or organisations. Organisations
will seek to protect its intellectual property. A related term is trade
secrets, which are those intellectual works used for a business purpose
that can be said to belong to that business and is not freely available in
the public domain.
Copyright: Protects the right of the owner to prevent
copying by others. Illegal copying is termed often termed piracy.
Patents: A patent is registered with the government
and provides the owner of the patent exclusive rights for a set number of
years (in the USA for 17 years).
The Internet has made the piracy of software and music
much easier and this has presented these industries with new challenges.
