Ethical and social issues in

Information Systems

Dr. Gonzalo Nápoles

Ethical and social issues
 Influence potential customers Let us falsify information
and governments record systems

Rip off the investors

Let us hide our bad Trading on insider
investments information
 Ethical and social issues

Ethics: It refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting
as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors

• Appropriated use of customer information

• Protection of the intellectual property
• Setting standards to safeguard system
quality that protects the safety of the
individual and society.
• Preserve values and institutions is deemed
essential in an information society.

What is the ethical and socially

responsible course of action?
 Money first and ethics later?

Ethics: Something you have to fulfill always even if it implies less money. The
end does not always justify the means!
Relationship between ethical, social and political issues
Five moral dimensions of the information age

What information rights do individuals and organizations possess

with respect to themselves? What can they protect?

Information Property rights

rights and and System quality
obligations obligations

Accountability
Quality of life
and control
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Information rights and obligations

Privacy is the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference
from other individuals or organizations, including the state.

Cookies are small text files that identifies the visitor’s Web browser
Internet challenges to

software and track visits to the Web site

Web beacons are objects invisibly embedded in Web pages that are
privacy

designed to monitor the behavior of the users

Spyware can install itself on an Internet user’s computer by

piggybacking on larger applications

GOOGLE!!!
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Information rights and obligations

How google uses the data it collects?
Google feature Data collected Use
Google search Google search topics. User’s Targeting texts ads placed in
Internet address search results
Gmail Contents of e-mail messages Targeting text ads placed
next to the e-mail messages
YouTube Data about videos uploaded Targeting ads for Google
and downloaded display-ad network
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

How will traditional intellectual property rights

be protected in a digital society?

Information Property rights

rights and and System quality
obligations obligations

Accountability
Quality of life
and control
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Property rights and obligations

Intellectual property (IP) is considered to be intangible property
created by individuals or corporations.

Trade secrets Copyright Patent law

• Protects the ideas in a work • A statutory grant that protects • It grants the owner an exclusive
product, not only their creators of IP from having their monopoly on the ideas behind an
manifestation work copied by others invention

• Nondisclosure agreements • Encourage creativity and • Inventors receive the full financial
between employees and authorship of people and other rewards of their labor and
customers can provide detailed diagrams
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Property rights and obligations

Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights

• Ease replication
Digital media differ
• Ease of transmission
from other physical
• Ease of alteration media like books or
• Difficulty in classifying a software work periodicals
• Compactness, making theft easy
• Difficulties in establishing uniqueness
Five moral dimensions of the information age

What standards of data and system quality should we

demand to protect individual rights and the safety of
society?

Information Property rights

rights and and System quality
obligations obligations

Accountability
Quality of life
and control
 Five moral dimensions of the information age
System quality

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

point should system managers say, “Stop testing, we have done all we can to
perfect this software. Ship it!”

Software
bugs and
errors
Hardware or
facility failures
caused by
natural or
Poor other causes
input
data
quality
Principal sources of poor system
performance
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Information Property rights

rights and and System quality
obligations obligations

Who can and will be

held accountable and
Accountability
liable for Quality of life
the harm done to and control
individual and collective
information and
property rights?
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Accountability and control

If a person is injured by a machine controlled, in part, by software, who should be

held accountable and, therefore, held liable?

• If seen a computer software as part of a machine, and the machine injures

someone, the producer of the software and the operator can be held liable
for damages.

• If a software acts like a book, storing and displaying information, courts have
been reluctant to hold authors, publishers, and booksellers liable for contents
• Liability laws must be extend its reach to include software even when the
software merely provides an information service.
Five moral dimensions of the information age

Information Property rights

rights and and System quality
obligations obligations

Accountability
Quality of life
and control

What values should be preserved in an information-

and knowledge-based society?
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Quality of life

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

making remains centralized.
• Rapidity of change: Businesses may not have enough time to respond to global
competition
• Maintaining boundaries: The traditional boundaries that separate work from
family have been weakened. Internet use takes people away from their family
and friends. It can lead to harmful anti-social behavior
• Dependence and vulnerability: The dependence on information systems makes
businesses vulnerable if these systems fail
 Five moral dimensions of the information age

Quality of life

• Computer crime and abuse

o Computer crime is the commission of illegal acts through the use of a
computer or against a computer system
o Computer abuse is the commission of not illegal buy unethical acts (Spam)
• Employment: Careful planning and sensitivity to employee needs can help
companies redesign work to minimize job losses
• Equity and Access: The information, knowledge, computers and access to these
resources are inequitably distributed along ethnic and social class lines
 Technology trends that raise ethical issues

Increase of Data storage

Data analysis Networking
computing costs rapidly
advances advances
power declining
Combine data
Copying data
Use IS for core from multiple
from one
production Every single sources and
location to
process device is create
another and
increase the capable to electronic
accessing
dependence storage data dossiers of
personal data
on systems and (Privacy detailed
from remote
vulnerability to violations) information on
locations are
systems errors individuals
much easier
(Profiling)
 Basic concepts for ethical analysis

Responsibility: means that you accept Accountability: there are mechanisms

the potential duties, and obligations for to determine who is the responsible.
the decisions you make

Concept extended to IS
the area of law impacts

Liability can be defined as the state of being

Social Individuals
legally responsible for something institutions
Organizations

Due process is a process in which laws are IS fall

known and understood, and there is an ability
to appeal to higher authorities to ensure that CONSEQUENCES
the laws are applied correctly.
You are accountable
Recovering by due process
General Data Protection Regulation
 In 2018 was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had gathered the
personal data of millions of Facebook profiles without people consent
and used it for political advertising purposes
 General Data Protection Regulation

What is?

• It’s a legal framework that requires businesses to protect the personal data and privacy
of European Union (EU) citizens for transactions that occur within EU member states. It
covers all companies that deal with the data of EU citizens, specifically banks,
insurance companies, and other financial companies

Directive GDPR 2016/679

95/46/EC
• Allows to adopt and customize the
law for the needs of its citizens
• It’s no longer relevant to today’s
digital age
• Requires full adoption for all 28 countries
• Any personal data exported outside the EU it
must be protected and regulated
• It’s a very high standard to meet, requiring
that companies invest large sums of money
to ensure they are in compliance
 How to prepare your business?

Persona
Add Cookie pop-up in the website
lly
identifia
ble Political
Consent for marketing activities
informa opinion
tion s
Healt Raci
Biome al / Change your privacy policy
h
tric ethni
and
data c
gene Security
tic data
data
Sexual Ready plan for data breach
Web - orienta
base tion
d Review & accept data retention terms
data

Users Types of data Actions Business

 The 8 basic rights of GDPR
• The right to access
• The right to be forgotten
• The right to data portability
• The right to be informed
• The right to have information
corrected
• The right to restrict processing
• The right to object
• The right to be notified

https://www.superoffice.com/blog/gdpr/
 Consequences

• Financial penalties
o It could be up to 17 million euros, or 4%
of a company’s annual turnover.
• Damaged reputation
o Take pride in the way you handle data.
• Compensation for damages
o Avid Life Media reached a settlement
agreement of around $11.2 million to be
paid to individuals affected by a breach
in its website for extramarital affairs
Ethics in Artificial Intelligence

Techniques to search
and analyse large
volumes of data
Conception, design,
manufacture and
operation of
programmable machines

Robotics
Machine
Learning
Artificial
Intelligence

AMDS

Predict human and machine behaviour

and to make autonomous decisions.
 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
1. Job loss and wealth inequality
• According to the new McKinsey Global Institute report, by the year 2030, about 800
million people will lose their jobs to AI-driven robots.

AI may
create more
jobs

Robots are
not paid
workers
 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
2. AI is imperfect — what if it makes a mistake?
• If trained well, using good data, then AIs can perform well. However, if we feed AIs
bad date or make errors with internal programming, the AIs can be harmful

“We need to ensure that the

machine performs as planned, and
that people can’t overpower it to
use it for their own ends”

Human beings are imperfect too right?

 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
3. Should AI systems be allowed to kill?
• A machine with AI is not created to do what we
want it to do, it does what it learns to do

“Fully autonomous weapons would lack the human judgment

necessary to evaluate the proportionality of an attack and
abide by other core principles of the laws of war”

Predator drones can fire missiles, although humans make the decisions
 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
4. Villain Artificial Intelligence
• If there is a chance that intelligent machines can make mistakes, then it is within the
realm of possibility that an AI can transform into the bad guy, or create unintended
consequences when searching for harmless goals.
 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
5. Singularity and keeping the control
• Will AIs evolve to surpass
human beings?
• What if they become smarter
than humans and then try to
control us?
• Will computers make humans
obsolete?

TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY
 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
6. How should we treat AI?
• Should robots be granted human rights or
citizenship?
• If robots evolve to the point that they are
capable of “feeling,” does that entitle
them with rights similar to humans?
• If robots are granted rights, then how do
we rank their social status?

ROBOETHICS
 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence
7. Bias in Artificial Intelligence
Bias can be introduced in two ways:
• errors introduced by its human makers
• the training data can have biases

- Facial recognition algorithms could detect

the gender of white men more accurately
than the gender of darker skin men

- Hiring and recruitment with AI algorithms

can prefer male candidates over female.

Wait a minute. Are machine biased?

 Ethics principles in Artificial Intelligence

Machines are not

biased, humans are!
 EU guidelines on ethics in Artificial Intelligence

2017 2018 2019 April 2019

The core principle of the EU guidelines is that the EU must develop a 'human-centric'
approach to AI that is respectful of European values and principles.
 EU guidelines on ethics in Artificial Intelligence

Developed mostly through Higher standard of protection against the social risks posed
private-sector initiatives by AI, in particular those affecting privacy, data
and self-regulation protection and discrimination rules

EU The key EU requirements for achieving

US
strategy trustworthy AI:
strategy • Human agency and oversight
• Robustness and safety
• Privacy and data governance
• Transparency in decision-making
Diversity, non-discrimination and fairness
Chinese •
• Societal and environmental well-being
strategy • accountability

Government-led and characterised by strong coordination of

private and public investment into AI technologies
 Bibliography
Chapter 4: Ethical and social issues in Information Systems
 Ethical and social issues in
Information Systems

Dr. Gonzalo Nápoles