Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

What ethical, social, and political issues are raised by ?

• What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide
ethical decisions?
• Why do contemporary technology and the Internet pose
challenges to the protection of individual privacy and
intellectual property?
• How have affected everyday life?
Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that

individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make
choices to guide their behaviors

Information systems raise new ethical questions for both

individuals and societies because they create
opportunities for intense social change, and thus threaten
existing distributions of power, money, rights, and
obligations .
Ethical, social, and political issues are closely linked.

Introduction of new technology has a ripple effect in the

current equilibrium, creating new ethical, social, and
political issues that must be dealt with on individual, social,
and political levels.

Both social and political institutions require time before

developing new behaviors, rules, and laws
The Relationship Between Ethical, Social, and Political
Issues in an Information Society

These issues have five moral dimensions:

Information rights and obligations,

Property rights and obligations,
System quality,
quality of life, and
accountability and control.
1. Information rights and obligations.
What information rights do individuals and organizations
possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect?
Eg. (Privacy &Web sites Privacy , Spyware , Cookies )

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?
Eg .(trade secret, copyright, and patent law)
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?
Eg .(Computer crime , Spam junk e-mail
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?
• Repetitive stress injury (RSI)
• Computer vision syndrome (CVS) any eyestrain
condition related to computer display screen use
• Techno stress 7
Four key technology trends have heightened the ethical
stresses on existing social arrangements and laws.

1. Computing power has doubled every 18

months allowing growing numbers of organizations to use
information systems in their core business processes. This
growing dependence on critical systems increases
vulnerability to system errors and poor data quality.

2. Advances in data storage techniques have enabled for

the multiplying databases on individuals maintained by
private and public organizations - making the violation of
individual privacy both cheap and effective.
3. Advances in data analysis techniques enable companies
and government agencies use profiling to determine detailed
information about individual's habits and tastes and create
dossiers of detailed information. Nonobvious relationship
awareness (NORA) is a new data analysis technology that
can take data about people from many sources and correlate
relationships to find hidden connections to identify potential
criminals and terrorists.

4. Advances in networking reduce the costs of moving and

accessing data, permitting privacy invasions on a vast scale.
Ethics in an Information Society

Ethical decisions draw on the concepts of:

Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs, duties, and
obligations of one's decisions accountability

Accountability: A feature of systems and social institutions,

accountability means that mechanisms are in place to
determine who took responsible action and who is
responsible for an action

Liability: Refers to the existence of laws that permit

individuals to recover the damages done to them by other
actors, systems, or organizations
Due process: Requires that laws are known and understood
by all, and that individuals can appeal to higher authorities to
ensure laws were properly applied

A five-step process can help analyze ethical issues:

(1)Identifying the facts,

(2)Defining the conflict or dilemma and identifying the
values involved,
(3)Identifying the stakeholders,
(4)Identifying options that can be taken, and
(5)Identifying potential consequences of actions.
Six traditional principles can be used to help forming an
ethical decision:
1. The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you.
2. Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative: If an action is
not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone.
3. Descartes' rule of change: If an action cannot be taken
repeatedly, it should not be taken at any time.
4. The Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that achieves
the higher or greater value.
5. The Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that
produces the least harm or least cost.
6. The ethical "no free lunch" rule: All tangible objects are
assumed owned by someone else unless specifically declared
otherwise.
Contemporary information systems have severely challenged
existing law and social practices protecting intellectual
property, which is the intangible property created by
individuals or corporations that is subject to protections under
trade secret, copyright, and patent law.

Digital media and software can be so easily copied, altered,

or transmitted, that it is difficult to protect with existing
intellectual property safeguards. Illegal copying of software
and music and video files is rampant worldwide
Information systems enable a "do anything anywhere" work
environment that erodes the traditional boundaries between
work and family life, lessening the time individuals can
devote to their families and personal lives.

Essential public organizations are ever more dependent on

vulnerable digital systems.

Computer crime (the commission of illegal acts through the

use of a computer against a computer system) and computer
abuse (the commission of acts involving a computer that may
not be illegal but are considered unethical) are primarily
committed by people inside the organization.
Spam is unrequested junk e-mail sent to thousands of Internet
users.