CHAPTER 1

1.1 Introduction

In the era where technologies being widely used and applied in everyday life, the

number of people being IT literate increases and computers will continue to have

greater impacts in the society when the technology advances. As the technologies

revolutionised and we produce data or information every day and it was thousands of

them, leading to the newly current issue which is big data. Easiest way to describe

big data is a structured, semistructured or unstructed large dataset. With the

collection and generation of data that is being produced every day, issues will arise,

particularly from the privacy perspective. There is no more anonymity over the data

and the privacy will be violated as the data not only available for the illegitimate user

but also the non-illegitimate user. There is issue whether the cyberethics is violated

when using the data, or is the owner aware of his data being shared and made public

by certain organization.

The latest example of the how privacy is threaten by big data was the biggest leak

last year, Panama Papers. It was first published on April 3 rd 2016, contains the list of

people consisted of politicians and wealthy figures around the world together with

their private financial information. 2.6 terabytes worth of data made up from torrents

of file of words, spreadsheets, emails, powerpoints and PDFs being analysed to

reveal the patterns, association with people,interaction events and also the locations.

The same case happened way back in April 2013 with Offshore Leaks. A report was

released with the detailed information of over 130 000 offshore accounts of the elites,

retrieved from the cached of 2.5millions secret records.

Big data is something that will continue growing as fast paced evolution of

information technology made us depend more on technologies and technical digital

devices. Digital traces were being left behind as we are using the cyberspace. This

will become an accumulate data that be used and analyse. Even with protected data

or information, it can become quite useless even with anonymity, when the other

information can be dig out with other variable that being made available. In the early

days, those torrents of data may take a while to process as there was no advance

technologies at that time, and there were possibilities that they were done manually.

But now, the process of analysing and crossing the data in the database to find the

patterns and association become easier with all the advance technologies, no longer

time consuming and inexpensive.

1.2 Problem Statement

Where almost every information available in digital space, most of the users of the

digital space still do not understand the ethical side of being in the virtual space.

People dont have high awareness of ethics conduct while surfing the net, and may

accidentally break them. While most of the information you can have at your

fingertips, are all information are public information? What about the information

that supposed to be private, but being publicize by the third party? Wouldnt that

abuse their privacy?

1.3 Objectives

Based on the authors personal observation about how people behaving on the

cyberspace, her objectives are mainly

a) To understand the impact of moral judgement on decision making

b) To investigate whether people aware of cyberethics and the consequences it

has on privacy
c) To develop an online application that works similarly to the way

personality/psychological test works

1.4 Research Question

These are the research questions that will be answered through this research :

Do the target audience fully understand the consequences of their action on

the issue of privacy

Do target audience have a basic understanding on what cyberethics is
What is the relationship of moral judgement with decision making? Does the

it have impact on the latter

Did the decision made will have impact on privacy
1.5 Research Motivation

The authors motivation behind this research was stem from her curiosity about

human behaviour in general. With everyday tasks such as bill paying or shopping for

groceries can be done online which can be factor into the creation of big data

together with the widespread use of social networking services, people nowadays

have no boundaries or a clear indication of when not to cross the line based on her

personal observation. Some of the things that were meant to be private are sometimes

being shared with hundreds of cyberspace users without the consent of the owners.

The sharer have no clear indication whether a piece of information can be shared

without threatening the owner or not. Most of the reason they gave is that if a piece

of information being made public, it is meant to be shared with others. In authors

opinion, some of the cyberspace users do not know how to ethically use the

cyberspace, or the ethics while surfing the internet. She wants to know what is the

level of understanding about the ethical use of the internet regarding privacy of the

people with no backgrounds in computer science or cyberethics.

CHAPTER 2

2.1 Literature Review

Since the digital revolution that started during late 1950s, it witnessed the change in

the way of document keeping, where instead of analogue, the document being kept

digitally. From mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics,

with the rapid growth of technology along the years, it has been adopted and

continues to the present day. As more and more information can be get online with

everything is basically at our fingertip, there will be more issues and risks arise due

to it.

According to a research done by Richard O.Mason in 1986 ethical issues involving

information and data in online space can be classified into four. Mason proposed a

PAPA model which is the acronym of Privacy, Accuracy, Property and Accessibility

as a guideline to tackle the ethical issues in information age and also to be used in the

studies of human behaviour and information technology and also a foundation of

information security design.

Privacy involves with ones ability to access any personal information in the

database. According to Mason, there are two factors that being a threat to privacy

matter, the growth of information technology and the increased value of information

in decision making. The activities of a person and his information are being recorded

into files, which then will be integrated into one single large database, revealing

intimate details. Sometimes, the data that we gave to the health agency or financial

institution can be reveal to the other parties and used by them for market research,

but do they have the right to reveal our intimate information? The data that we

provided is being used for another purpose other than our intended purpose without

the permission of the affected parties or in their knowledge.

Next is accuracy. The big questions with accuracy is, how do we know either ones

information is accurate or there is no misinformation regarding the matter? Some

information is being taken as truth when there is no evidence that proves the

information is accurate, misinformation can affect peoples lives and the impact is

bigger when someone that holds the wrong information is someone in power. A

person who is accountable for accuracy should be identified. A serious consequences

can be generated even by a slight simple mistake. Apart from the data itself, the

accuracy also depends on the system itself. The systems should be error free and the

produces data should also be accurate and up-to-date, so the system is able to

produce accurate and error-free result to the person who enquires it.

Property also being addressed as ethical issues in information age by Mason. By

definition, property is something that a person owned or possessed, so when

browsing through the information space, people must keep in mind that all the

information and data have their owners. This is the concerns involving intellectual

properties right or copyright. All the information, data and computer software are

being protected by copyright law. Producing a piece of information or software

programmes can be costly, but after it already be produced, it later can be easily

reproduced without being credited back to the author. It can also be altered, creating

a false information which can be misleading and different from the authors original

intentions. Royalty is another issue related with copyright. The author can be robbed

out of his right to the portion of the sale from the merchandised.

Lastly, the final issue that is being discussed is access. Access basically deals with

the privilege given to an organization or person to gain access to the information

provided. To have access and using the information available online, a person must

be literate, which means he must has an intellectual skills to handle the information.
He must also have a physical access to hardware, software, database, internet or any

devices that is use to process and retrieve the information. Some may not afford to

have their own devices at home, they can go to the centralized facilities such as

public libraries or school. Finally, the person himself, must has the access to the

information.

According to a paper written by Brey.P (2007), privacy is being valued the most in

the modern society, because of the belief that they have the autonomy over their own

destiny, but also at the same being under surveillances is also expected in the modern

society. It is also being accepted as a norm in the corporate world and being

performed routinely across all different kinds of organizations. It is contrast to what

being valued in the modern society as being under surveillance also means that you

tend to lose your privacy. Not only their data or information was being recorded, it

was also their actions.

The surveillance technique being upgraded throughout the years with increasing

scale, ease and speed and also made a dataveillance, a large scale computerized

process of collecting and processing data and information to be able to monitor,

record and process the actions and communications possible, along with other new

technologies of CCTV, biometrics and intelligent user interface. Dispute arises from

the society views of autonomy control of their own privacy and corporate interest in

surveillance.

Being in virtual space, ones personal information can sometimes publicly available

without the owner giving his consent explicitly, and the information often contains

sensitive information which by doing a simple search using the search engine can

reveal them. The third parties can also collected your information and monitoring
your online behaviour while you are connected to the internet, which than can be

leaked to another parties for their own purpose that will give them advantages and

profits. As now, most of the transactions and activities being deal online, sometimes

it requires us to provide our personal information, and it then will be stored in an

online databases. The existence of online databases contributed to another issue

concerning privacy.

These databases are often combined to create a new data structure. The process of

combining is either by merging or matching the database. Merging is a process when

the information about a person is being collected from different databases into one

large record while matching is done by cross checking two or more unrelated

databases to provide a hit. This situation altogether lead to data mining. As the

technology progressed, the impact on the privacy issue will be bigger, there will be

more new technology that can threatens the privacy and a new prevention is always

needed for data privacy.

Apart from the given discussion above, people who are being responsible for the

information or information professionals should take a few ethical issue into

consideration. The information that is given or collected should be categorised into

their purposes, the information professionals should never use the given information

other than their original intended purpose and they must be treated as confidential.

The purpose also should be explicitly stated to the individual. There are also certain

guidelines that they have to follow, as information professionals, they must

acknowledge the autonomy and freedom of an individuals.

Meaning, they should conform to the expectation of an individual that any of the

information given to them will remain private until a consent is given for them to use
the information. If the information is no longer useful or no longer serve their

purposes, they are expected to be destroyed. A policy also must be ruled out to

protect the privacy of the information as discussed by a paper written by J.J

Britz(1996).

Given all the reasons stated above, it is obvious the biggest threat to the data is data

privacy and confidentiality in the era of growing big data. There are challenges that

need to be faced in order to keep the data confidentiality, a proper steps need to be

taken to ensure that. With the fast paced evolution with technology, there is increased

in numbers of people being unethical. Excluding those group of people committing

illegal data breach for their own gains, we should worry more about the ignorant

ones. They are more dangerous than the one committing a very clear and obvious

crime in the cyberspace. They can be intentionally intruding the privacy of private

information that belong to owner and spreading them, encouraging more shares,

without understanding the consequences of the action.

In order to understand the subject and conducting the research, we need to

understand the rationality of each human decisions, and the factor that incite human

to make certain decision. In order to understand more, we will dwelve into

Kohlbergs Moral Development Theory. According to Kohlberg, human moral

reasoning is progressed in a series of stage. The stage is being divided into three

levels which each of them will contain their own stages.

The first level is Pre-conventional level, this is the level where people is abide by the

cultural rules and the perception of people towards them. The behaviour can only be

labelled as bad or good, which can be found generally in elementary school level.

Any behaviours that are not condone by the socially acceptable norms is being
threaten by application of punishment, resulting in obedience. This level is then

being separated into stage 1 and 2, Punishment-Obedience Orientation and

Instrumental Relativist Orientation respectively. The first stage usually include a

punishment for any misconduct behaviour or not obeying certain cultural norm or

rules usually exerted by someone with authority in their hands. As it being discussed

in the previous lines, punishment is one of the way to gain obedience from people.

While the first stage focus on punishment to gain obedience, the second stage is more

about the behaviour that being done is being controlled by the view of what is the

right behaviour of a person and based on individual needs of a person. Morality is

judge by those who sharing the same interest.

Moving on to the next level, the Conventional level. This is mostly found in the

society, hence the name. In this level and individual strives to behave in the way that

is expected from his family, group, or nation regardless the consequences. This

conform to the expectation of maintaining, supporting and justifying the order and

identifying or group involves in it (B.Robert 2000). In this level contains stage 3,

The interpersonal or good boy-nice girl orientation and stage 4, The law and

order orientation. In stage 3, people behave in a way to please people and gaining

approval from them, and the latter is more about abiding and behaving by the law.

Lastly, the third level, Post-Conventional, Autonomous, or Principle Level. At this

level, an effort is made by an individuals to define moral value with the universal

principle and the relation that both share. Stage 5 and 6 fall into this level. Stage 5 is

Special Contract Orientation, where individuals start valuing and looking at different

opinions from other people and reaching a mutual social understanding. Stage 6 is

where a person conscience is called and the standard of normal behaviour is being

define universally.
Kohlberg stated that the progress is done by one level at a time, and one cannot

simply jump a level or a stage. People should be presented with moral dilemmas to

encourage their moral development. Based on Kohlbergs theory, James Rest devised

a component model to measure the moral development of a person in 1974. The

component model is named as Defining Issue Test, or commonly known by the

acronym DIT.

A Defining Issues Test or DIT is used to measure the moral judgement development

and is based from the Kohlbergs Moral Development theory. DIT works by

providing all the participants in the test with moral dilemmas and rank and rate the

12 items in each of them. A particular issue is raised for each item representing

central features of the dilemma based on moral schema and consideration. If the

dilemma make sense to them, a high ranking and rating will be given, if not, the item

will be given low rating. Three specific schema of moral reasoning information will

be revealed, Personal interest schema, Maintaining Norms schema, and

Postconventional Schema. It is also dubbed as Neo-Kohlberg approach. (Stephen J.

Thoma, Yangxue Dong 2014)

Referring back to the question, is the decision making is influenced by the moral

judgement of an individuals? In this research, instrument that is used to measure

moral judgement is DIT. We have to look into the relationship between the variables.

There are factors that should be taken into consideration when linking moral

judgement and decision making, one of them being moral flexibility. People will

make decision based on those that will resonate to their moral standard, but that

decision will be influenced by their own belief and perception. Like how some

parents believe on letting a child experiencing on his own or enforcing a strict rule to
avoid any misconduct or misbehaviour in the future. A decision is made based on

moral judgement but also depends on the context. (Daniel M. Bartels 2015)

A relationship between moral judgement and decision making is indeed exist

positively, however, it was not fully supported. Counting in the other aspects that

might affect the process of moral judgement for individuals ethical behaviour. An

individuals ethical behaviour cannot be inferred from the P-score of DIT alone. A

person with high P-score cannot be inferred as ethical person and vice versa. (P.

Ballantine 1999)

According to a research done by Mustafa Sami in 2010, revealed that in the present

study, males have higher scores than female students in terms of maintaining norms,

and female students have higher scores than male students in terms of post

conventional schema. These findings may be interpreted that since females had a

higher empathy levels than males. Childrens moral attitude is greatly influenced by

parental attitude. Mother coming from a good educated background tends to be more

democratic compared to those without or low education background.

While for the age and educational level of a person do not have any relationship

between the schemas of the DIT, a significant relationship found between

participants schema scores and their universities. But some of the studies say

otherwise for the relationship between the schemas and the age and educational level

of a person.

In conclusion, there are factors that need to be taken into consideration while doing

DIT to asses an individuals moral judgement. There are studies that stated that DIT

does not influenced by cultural background, but there are quite a number of studies

that stated otherwise. In the authors opinion, educational background does play
some role in regards of this research, because in order to investigate either people is

aware of cyberethics or not, those with certain educational background might

encounter with them and familiar with the term.

CHAPTER 3

3.1 Methodology

The purpose of this research is to gain insight on the level of understanding of the

cyberspace user on the privacy of data and how it impacts on privacy. It will be a

combination of both qualitative and quantitative research methods. This research will

dive more into understanding the underlying reasons behind their moral judgement

and how it will influence their decision making.

This research target audience will be taken from several universities and it will be

two sample one with computer science background and the other is non and it will

focus on the students with no computer science or cyberethics background. As the

students with these backgrounds may have the gist on how data privacy works and

the ethical use of cyberspace, the author wants to eliminate any probability of these

sample influencing the result that the author intended it to be. The author wants to

see the differences in level of awareness in these two sample. Students are selected

because most of them are relatively young in age (18 to 30 years old) and know their

ways with the technologies.

Data collection will be conducted via surveys and questionnaires. A series of

questions will be crafted and will be distributed via online survey to the students. The

gathered data then will be analyse by using Defining Issue Test (DIT). DIT is a test

using Kohlbergs moral development theory to measure the moral judgement

development of a person.

An online application will be created and will be made available online. The

structure will be similar to the online psychological/personality test but the result will

be assessed by using the DIT algorithm.

REFERENCES

Brey, P. (n.d.). Ethical Aspects of Information Security and Privacy. Data-Centric

Systems and Applications Security, Privacy, and Trust in Modern Data Management,

21-36. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-69861-6_3

(https://www.utwente.nl/bms/wijsb/organization/brey/publicaties_brey/brey_2007_in

formation_security.pdf)

Mason, R. O. (1986). Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age. MIS Quarterly,

10(1), 5. doi:10.2307/248873

KUAN, L. H., IDRUS, R., & AB RAHMAN MUTON, N. (n.d.). Cyberethics

Awareness using Defining Issues Test: A Preliminary Findings

(http://www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2014/Florence/CSCCA/CSCCA-41.pdf)

Britz, J. J. (n.d.). TECHNOLOGY AS A THREAT TO PRIVACY: Ethical Challenges

to the Information Profession.

(http://web.simmons.edu/~chen/nit/NIT'96/96-013-breit.html)

"A SUMMARY OF LAWRENCE KOHLBERG'S STAGES OF MORAL

DEVELOPMENT", California State University, 2000. [Online]. Available:

https://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/kohlberg01bk.htm.

L. Kohlberg, Moral Development: A Review of the Theory, 16th ed. 2016.

L. Kohlberg, "Stages of Moral Development", 1971. [Online]. Available:

http://info.psu.edu.sa/psu/maths/Stages%20of%20Moral%20Development

%20According%20to%20Kohlberg.pdf

"The defining issues test of moral judgment development", BEHAVIORAL

DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN, 2014. [Online]. Available:

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bdb/19/3/55.pdf.

http://www.adultdevelopment.org/ThomaDong2012.pdf

M. Sami, "A Reliability and Validity Study of the Defining Issues Test: The

Relationship of Age, Education, Gender and Parental Education with Moral

Development", Kuram ve Uygulamada Eitim Bilimleri (KUYEB), 2010. [Online].

Available:

http://www.kuyeb.com/pdf/en/b8f0b254c7ab99e8fb4ae578770766edpcuEN.pdf

J. Rest, D. Narvaez, M. Bebeau and S. Thoma, "A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach: The

DIT and Schema Theory", University of Notre Dame, 1999. [Online]. Available:

https://www3.nd.edu/~dnarvaez/documents/EdPsyRev99Rest.pdf

Daniel M. Bartels, Christopher W. Bauman, Fiery A. Cushman, David A. Pizarro,

and A. Peter McGraw, "Moral Judgment and Decision Making," in The Wiley

Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making, G. Keren and G. Wu, Eds.,

First Edition ed. John Wiley & Sons,Ltd,2015,pp.478515.[Online].

Available:http://home.uchicago.edu/~bartels/papers/BartelsEtAl-MoralJDM-

2015.pdf.

P. Ballantine, J. Kennedy, and Daniel A. Sauers, "MORAL JUDGEMENT AND

ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON OF

FUTURE MARKETERS," in Marketing in the Third Millennium: Proceedings of

ANZMAC99, presented at the Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy

Conference, School of Marketing, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW,

1999. [Online]. Available:

http://www.anzmac.org/conference_archive/1999/Site/B/Ballantine.pdf.