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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related To Systems

This document discusses ethical issues related to information systems. It provides an overview of key concepts like responsibility, accountability, and liability. It then presents a model for analyzing ethical, social, and political issues, identifying five moral dimensions: information rights and obligations, property rights and obligations, accountability and control, system quality, and quality of life. The document also discusses challenges to privacy from technologies like cookies, web beacons, and spyware. It concludes by examining intellectual property protections like trade secrets, patents, and copyright in the digital age.

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60 views20 pages

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related To Systems

This document discusses ethical issues related to information systems. It provides an overview of key concepts like responsibility, accountability, and liability. It then presents a model for analyzing ethical, social, and political issues, identifying five moral dimensions: information rights and obligations, property rights and obligations, accountability and control, system quality, and quality of life. The document also discusses challenges to privacy from technologies like cookies, web beacons, and spyware. It concludes by examining intellectual property protections like trade secrets, patents, and copyright in the digital age.

Uploaded by

normie.fieldguy132x
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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UNDERSTANDING

ETHICAL
\

AND SOCIAL ISSUES


RELATED TO SYSTEMS
About Company
Basic concepts: responsibility, accountability, and liability
Ethical analysis
Candidate ethical principles
Professional codes of conduct
Introduction

In the past 10 years, we have witnessed, arguably, one of the most


ethically challenging periods for U.S. and global business. Table 4.1
provides a small sample of recent cases demonstrating failed
ethical judgment by senior and middle managers.

In today’s new legal environment, managers who violate the law


and are convicted will most likely spend time in prison. U.S. federal
sentencing guidelines adopted in 1987 mandate that federal judges
impose stiff sentences on business executives based on the
monetary value of the crime, the presence of a conspiracy to
prevent discovery of the crime, the use of structured financial
transactions to hide the crime, and failure to cooperate with
prosecutors (U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2004).
What Is Ethics?

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.
A MODEL FOR THINKING
ABOUT ETHICAL, SOCIAL, AND
POLITICAL ISSUES
Ethical, social, and political issues are closely
linked. The ethical dilemma you may face as
a manager of information systems typically
is reflected in social and political debate.

One way to think about these relationships


is shown in the image below.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHICAL,
SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN AN
INFORMATION SOCIETY: FIVE MORAL
DIMENSIONS
FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS

The major ethical, social, and political


issues raised by information systems
include the following moral dimensions:

Information rights and obligations


What information rights do individuals and organizations possess
with respect to themselves? What can they protect?

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?
Accountability and control
Who can and will be held accountable and liable for
the harm done to individual and collective information
and property rights?

System quality
What standards of data and system quality should we
demand to protect individual rights and the safety of
society?

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 TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
THAT RAISE ETHICAL ISSUES
There are four key technological trends responsible for these
ethical stresses .
ETHICS IN AN
INFORMATION SOCIETY
Ethics is a concern of humans who have freedom of choice. Ethics
is about individual choice: When faced with alternative courses of
action, what is the correct moral choice? What are the main
features of ethical choice?

Responsibility
is a key element of ethical action.

Accountability
It is a feature of systems and social institutions: It means that
mechanisms are in place to determine who took responsible action,
and who is responsible
Liability
extends the concept of responsibility further to the area of laws. Liability is a feature of
political systems in which a body of laws is in place that permits individuals to recover
the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations
Ethics Analysis
When confronted with a situation that seems to present ethical issues, how
should you analyze it? The following five-step process should help:

1. Identify and describe the facts clearly. Find out


who did what to whom, and where, when, and how. 4. Identify the options that you can
reasonably take. You may find that none of the
2. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the options satisfy all the interests involved, but
higher-order values involved. Ethical, social, and that some options do a better job than others.
political issues always reference higher values.

3. Identify the stakeholders. Every ethical, social, 5. Identify the potential consequences of
and political issue has stakeholders: players in the your options. Some options may be ethically
game who have an interest in the outcome, who correct but disastrous from other points of
have invested in the situation, and usually who have view.
vocal opinions. F
Internet Challenges to Privacy
Internet technology has posed new challenges for the protection of
individual privacy. Information sent over this vast network of networks
may pass through many different computer systems before it reaches
its final destination.

Cookies are small text files deposited on a


computer hard drive when a user visits Web
sites. Cookies identify the visitor’s Web browser
software and track visits to the Web site
Web sites using cookie technology cannot
directly obtain visitors’ names and addresses
Internet Challenges to Privacy

Web beacons, also called Web bugs (or simply “tracking files”), are tiny software
programs that keep a record of users’ online clickstream and report this data back to
whomever owns the tracking file invisibly embedded in e-mail messages and Web
pages that are designed to monitor the behavior of the user visiting a Web site or
sending e-mail.

spyware can secretly install itself on an Internet user’s computer by piggybacking


on larger applications. Once installed, the spyware calls out to Web sites to send
banner ads and other unsolicited material to the user, and it can report the user’s
movements on the Internet to other computers.
PROPERTY RIGHTS: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Contemporary information systems have


severely challenged existing laws and social
practices that protect private intellectual
property

Intellectual property is considered to be intangible


property created by individuals or corporations.
Information technology has made it difficult to
protect intellectual property because computerized
information can be so easily copied or distributed on
networks. Intellectual property is subject to a variety
of protections under three different legal traditions:
trade secrets, copyright, and patent law.
Three different legal traditions

Trade Secrets Copyright Patents


TRADE SECRETS
Any intellectual work product—a formula, device, pattern, or compilation
of data—used for a business purpose can be classified as a trade secret,
provided it is not based on information in the public domain.

Trade secret law protects the actual ideas in a work product, not only their
manifestation. To make this claim, the creator or owner must take care to
bind employees and customers with nondisclosure agreements and to
prevent the secret from falling into the public domain
Patents
A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an
invention for 20 years.

The key concepts in patent law are originality, novelty, and invention. The
Patent Office did not accept applications for software patents routinely
until a 1981 Supreme Court decision that held that computer programs
could be a part of a patentable process. Since that time, hundreds of
patents have been granted and thousands await consideration.

The strength of patent protection is that it grants a monopoly on the


underlying concepts and ideas of software.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property
from having their work copied by others for any purpose during the life of
the author plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death.

For corporate-owned works, copyright protection lasts for 95 years after


their initial creation. Congress has extended copyright protection to books,
periodicals, lectures, dramas, musical compositions, maps, drawings,
artwork of any kind, and motion pictures. The intent behind copyright laws
has been to encourage creativity and authorship by ensuring that creative
people receive the financial and other benefits of their work. Most
industrial nations have their own copyright laws, and there are several
international conventions and bilateral agreements through which nations
coordinate and enforce their laws.
THANK YOU
FOR YOUR ATTENTION

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