MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Chapter4
Ethical and Social Issues in
Information Systems

Mohammad Najjar, PhD, MBA, BSc

Operations & Supply Chain Management
Learning Objectives
1. Identify ethical, social and political issues raised by
information systems
2. Discuss codes of conduct
3. Identify the influence of information systems on privacy and
intellectual property
• The Web sites you visit track the search engine queries you
enter, pages visited, Web content viewed, ads clicked, videos
watched, content shared, and the products you purchase.

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Ethical and Social Issues
• Google is the largest Web tracker, monitoring thousands of Web
sites

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Ethical and Social Issues

• Technology can be a double-edged sword:

– It can be the source of many benefits (by showing you ads
relevant to your interests)
– but it can also create new opportunities for invading your
privacy, and enabling the reckless use of that information
in a variety of decisions about you
• Search engine marketing is arguably the most effective form
of advertising in history,
• Banner display ad marketing is highly inefficient because it
displays ads to everyone regardless of their interests.

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Ethical and Social Issues

• Hence the search engine marketers cannot charge much for

display ad space
• Internet users, they can develop a very clear picture of who
you are, and use that information to show you ads that might
be of interest to you. This would make the marketing process
more efficient, and more profitable for all the parties involved
• But this solution also creates an ethical dilemma:
– Pitting the monetary interests of the online advertisers
and search engines against the interests of individuals to

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Ethical and Social Issues

maintain a sense of control over their personal

information and their privacy.
• As a manager,
– you will need to be sensitive to both the negative and
positive impacts of information systems for your firm,
employees, and customers.
– You will need to learn how to resolve ethical dilemmas
involving information systems.
• Ethics

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Ethical and Social Issues

– Principles of right and wrong that individuals,

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

– Ethics is about individual choice: When faced

with alternative courses of action, what is the
correct moral choice?

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Information Systems and Ethics

– Information technology can be used to achieve

social progress, but it can also be used to
commit crimes and threaten social values.

– For instance, Information systems raise new

ethical questions because they create
opportunities for:
• Intense social change, threatening existing
distributions of power, money, rights, and
obligations
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Information Systems and Ethics

• New kinds of crime

– Ethics and the Internet:
• Ethical issues in information systems have been
given new urgency by the rise of the Internet and
electronic commerce.
• Internet and digital firm technologies make it
easier than ever to assemble, integrate, and
distribute information, unleashing new concerns
about the appropriate use of customer

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Information Systems and Ethics

information, the protection of personal privacy,

and the protection of intellectual property.
• Three levels: individual, social, and (legal)
political

• A model for thinking about ethical, social,

and legal Issues
– Think of a society as a calm pond
– IT as rock dropped in pond, creating ripples of new
situations not covered by old rules
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Information Systems and Ethics

– Social (e.g. family, education, etc.) and legal (political)

institutions cannot respond overnight to these ripples
—it may take years to develop expectations and laws

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Moral Dimensions
The introduction of
new information
technology has a ripple
effect, raising new
ethical, social, and
legal issues that must
be dealt with on the
individual, social, and
political levels. These
issues have five moral
dimensions:
information rights and

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Moral Dimensions
obligations, property rights and obligations, system quality, quality of life, and
accountability and control.

• Five moral dimensions of the

information age:
– Information rights and obligations
– Property rights and obligations
– Accountability and control
– System quality
Moral Dimensions

– Quality of life
– Information rights and obligations:
• What information rights do individuals 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?
– Accountability and control
Moral Dimensions

• 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
Moral Dimensions

• What values should be preserved in an information-

and knowledge-based society? Which institutions and
values should we protect from violation?
Technology Trends Affecting
Ethics
• Key technology trends that raise ethical
issues
– Doubling of computer power
• More organizations depend on computer systems for critical
operations.

– Rapidly declining data storage costs

• Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on
individuals.
Technology Trends Affecting
– Networking advances and the Internet
• Copying data from one location to another and accessing
personal data from remote locations are much easier.

Ethics
– Advances in data analysis techniques
• Profiling
– Combining data from multiple sources to create
dossiers of detailed information on individuals
• Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA)
Technology Trends Affecting
– Combining data from multiple sources to find
obscure hidden connections that might help
identify criminals or terrorists
– Mobile device growth
• Tracking of
individual
cell phones

Ethics
NORA technology can take
information about people
from disparate sources and
find obscure, nonobvious
Technology Trends Affecting
relationships. It might discover, for example, that an applicant for a job at a casino
shares a telephone number with a known criminal and issue an alert to the hiring
manager.
Ethics in an Information Society
Ethics is a concern of humans
who have freedom of choice.

Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals who are

responsible for the consequences of their actions.
• Basic concepts for ethical analysis (key elements
in ethical action):
– Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs, duties, and
obligations for decisions (accepting the consequences of your
decision)
Ethics in an Information Society
– Accountability: means that mechanisms are in place to determine
who took the action, and who is responsible.

– Liability: Extends the concept of responsibility further to the area

of laws. It means a body of laws is in place that permits individuals
to recover the damages done to them by other actors.
– Due process: a process in which laws are known and understood,
and there is an ability to appeal to higher authorities to ensure that
the laws are applied correctly. Individuals can recover damages
done to them through a set of laws characterized by due process.
• Five-step ethical analysis
1. Identify and clearly describe the facts.
Ethics in an Information Society
2. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the
higher-order values involved.
3. Identify the stakeholders.
4. Identify the options that you can reasonably
take.
5. Identify the potential consequences of your
options.
• Five-step ethical analysis 1.
Identify and clearly describe the facts: Find out who did what
to whom, and where, when, and how
Ethics in an Information Society
2.
Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order
values involved: The parties to a dispute all claim to be
pursuing higher values, e.g. the need to improve health care
record keeping and the need to protect individual privacy

3.
Identify the stakeholders: players in the game who have an
interest in the outcome, who have invested in the situation, etc.
• Five-step ethical analysis 4.
Ethics in an Information Society
Identify the options that you can reasonably take: arriving at
a good or ethical solution may not always be a balancing of
consequences to stakeholders.

5.
Identify the potential consequences of your options: Some
options may be ethically correct but disastrous from other
points of view. Other options may work in one instance but
not in other similar instances
Once your analysis is complete, what ethical approaches or rules
should you use to make a decision?
Ethics in an Information Society
Although you are the only one who can decide which among
many ethical principles you will follow, and how you will
prioritize them, it is helpful to consider some ethical approaches
with deep roots in many cultures that have survived throughout
recorded history, next slide
• Candidate ethical approaches – Golden Rule
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
Putting yourself into the place of others – Categorical
Imperative
• If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not
right for anyone. Ask yourself, “If everyone did this,
Ethics in an Information Society
could the organization, or society, survive? – Rule of
Change
• If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right
to take at all. An action may bring about a small
change now that is acceptable, but if it is repeated, it
would bring unacceptable changes in the long run.
• Candidate ethical principles (cont.) – Utilitarian
Principle
• Take the action that achieves the higher or greater
value. This rule assumes you can prioritize values in a
rank order and understand the consequences of
various courses of action
Ethics in an Information Society
– Risk Aversion Principle
• Take the action that produces the least harm or potential
cost. Some actions have extremely high failure costs of
very low probability (e.g. building a nuclear generator)
– Ethical “NoFree Lunch”Rule
• Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects
are owned by someone unless there is a specific
declaration otherwise. (relate to copyrights, patents,
etc.)
• Professional codes of conduct
– Proclaimed by associations of professionals
• Examples: American Medical Association (AMA)
Ethics in an Information Society
– Promises by professions to regulate themselves in the general
interest of society (e.g. avoiding harm to others)
– These professional groups take responsibility for the partial
regulation of their professions by determining entrance
qualifications and competence (put rules to be qualified).
• Real-world ethical dilemmas
– One set of interests pitted against another
• Example: right of company to maximize productivity of workers
versus workers right to use Internet for short personal tasks,
replacing people for technology, reducing the size of workforce,
etc.
Moral Dimensions –
Information Rights
• Information rights: privacy and freedom in
the Internetage
– Privacy:
• Claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance
or interference from other individuals, organizations, or
state; claim to be able to control information about yourself
• Information technology and systems threaten individual
claims to privacy

– In the United States, privacy protected by:

Moral Dimensions –
• First Amendment (freedom of speech)
• Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)
• Additional federal statues (e.g., Privacy Act of 1974)

Information Rights
• Fair information practices (FIP):
– Set of principles governing the collection and use of information
• Basis of most U.S. and European privacy laws
• Based on mutuality of interest between record holder and
individual, once information is gathered by record holder, the
individual maintains an interest in the record, and the record
may not be used to support other activities without the
individual’s consent.
Moral Dimensions –
• Restated and extended by FTC (Federal Trade Commission) in
1998 to provide guidelines for protecting online privacy
– Used to drive changes in privacy legislation
• COPPA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011

Information Rights
• FTC FIP principles:
– Notice/awareness (core principle)
• Web sites must disclose practices before collecting data, e.g. uses
of data; other recipients of data, etc. – Choice/consent (core principle)
• Consumers must be able to choose how information is used for
secondary purposes. – Access/participation
• Consumers must be able to review and contest accuracy of
personal data. – Security
Moral Dimensions –
• Data collectors must take steps to ensure accuracy, security of
personal data.
– Enforcement
• Must be mechanism to enforce FIP principles.

Information Rights
• European Directive on Data Protection:
– Companies must inform people that information is
collected and disclose how it is stored and used.
– Requires informed consent of customer.
Moral Dimensions –
– EU member nations cannot transfer personal data to
countries without similar privacy protection (e.g., the
United States).

Information Rights
• Internet challenges to privacy:
– Cookies
• Identify browser and track visits to site
• Super cookies (Flash cookies)
– Web beacons (Web bugs)
• Tiny graphics embedded in e-mails and Web pages
• Monitor who is reading e-mail message or visiting site
Moral Dimensions –
– Spyware
• Installed on user’scomputer
• May transmit user’skeystrokes or display unwanted ads
– Google services and behavioral targeting
Moral Dimensions
Moral Dimensions –
Cookies are written by a Web site on a visitor’s hard drive. When the visitor
returns to that Web site, the Web server requests the ID number from the cookie
and uses it to access the data stored by that server on that visitor. The Web site
can then use these data to display personalized information.

Information Rights
>> Google has been using behavioral targeting to help it
display more relevant ads based on users’ search activities.

>> One of its programs enables advertisers to target ads based on

the search histories of Google users, along with any other
information the user submits to Google that Google can obtain,
such as age, demographics, region, and other Web activities
Moral Dimensions –
>> Google has also been scanning the contents of messages
received by users of its free Web-based e-mail service called Gmail.
Ads that users see when they read their e-mail are related to the
subjects of these messages.

Information Rights
>> An opt-out model permits the collection of personal information until
the consumer specifically requests that the data not be collected.

>> Opt-in model of informed consent in which a business is prohibited

from collecting any personal information unless the consumer
specifically takes action to approve information collection and use.
Moral Dimensions –
Information Rights
• Besides legislations, there are Technical
solutions to protect a user privacy:
– E-mail encryption
– Anti-spyware tools
– Browser features
• “Private”browsing
• “Donot track”options
Moral Dimensions –
– Overall, few technical solutions

Property Rights
• Property rights: Intellectual property
– Intellectual property: intangible property of any
kind 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.
Moral Dimensions –
Property Rights
– Three main ways that intellectual property is
protected:
• Trade secret (‫)ةي راجتال رارس ألا‬: intellectual work or
product belonging to business(e.g. formula for
Coke)
• Copyright (‫)رش نالوعبطال ق وقح‬: statutory grant
protecting intellectual property from being copied
for the life of the author, plus 70 years (copyright of
a photo, book)
Moral Dimensions –
• Patents (‫)ع ارتخإلا ةءارب‬: grants the owner an
exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an
invention for 20 years (Amazon’s One Click
shopping).

Property Rights
• Challenges to intellectual property rights
– Digital media different from physical media (e.g., books)
• Digital media differ from books, periodicals, and other media in terms of ease
of replication; ease of transmission; ease of alteration; difficulty in classifying
a software work as a program, book, or even music; compactness—making
theft easy; and difficulties in establishing uniqueness.
Moral Dimensions –
• Mechanisms are being developed to sell and distribute
books, articles, and other intellectual property legally on
the Internet, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) of 1998 is providing some copyright protection.
Internet service providers (ISPs) are required to take down
sites of copyright infringers that they are hosting once they
are notified of the problem
Moral Dimensions –
Accountability, Liability, Control
• Accountability, liability, control –
Computer-related liability problems • If
software fails, who is responsible?
– If a person is injured by a machine controlled, in part,
by software, who should be held accountable and,
therefore, held liable?
– Uploading offensive material, responsibility of
website developers (e.g. youtube) or broadcasters?
– In conclusion, it is difficult to ascribe liability to
software developers for the same reason that it is
Moral Dimensions –
difficult to ascribe a publisher liability for the effects
of a book.

System Quality
• System quality: Data quality and system errors
– Liability and accountability for unintentional consequences
lead the other moral dimension – System Quality
– What is an acceptable, technologically feasible level of
system quality?
– Individuals and organizations may be held responsible for
avoidable and foreseeable consequences, which they have
a duty to perceive and correct. And the gray area is that
Moral Dimensions –
some system errors are foreseeable and correctable only
at very great expense, an expense so great that pursuing
this level of perfection is not feasible economically—no
one could afford the product (so in gray areas, what should
organizations do?).

System Quality
– Three principal sources of poor system
performance:
• Software bugs, errors
• Hardware failures
Moral Dimensions –
• Poor input data quality

Quality of Life
• Quality of life: Equity, access, boundaries-

Computers and information technologies

potentially can destroy valuable elements of our
culture and society even while they bring us
benefits.
Moral Dimensions –
Quality of Life
• Quality of life: Equity, access, boundaries-

Negative social consequences of systems

– Balancing power: centralized mainframe computers would

centralize power at corporate headquarters and in the nation’s
capital. However, the shift toward highly decentralized
computing, coupled with an ideology of empowerment of
thousands of workers, and the decentralization of decision
Moral Dimensions –
making to lower organizational levels, have reduced the fears of
power centralization in institutions.

Quality of Life
Negative social consequences of systems (cont.)

- Rapidity of change: Information systems have helped to

create much more efficient national and international
markets. However, businesses may not have enough time to
respond to global competition

- Maintaining boundaries: Technology impact the balance

between Family, Work, and Leisure
Moral Dimensions –
- Dependence and vulnerability: public and private
organizations ever more dependent on computer systems,
therefore, they are highly vulnerable if these systems fail.

Quality of Life
Negative social consequences of systems (cont.)

- Computer crime and abuse

- Computer crime: illegal acts through use of computer or against
a computer system—computer may be object or instrument of
crime
- Computer abuse: unethical acts, not illegal
Moral Dimensions –
• Spam: high costs for businesses in dealing with spam
• Spam is junk e-mail sent by an organization or individual to
a mass audience of Internet users who have expressed no
interest in the product or service being marketed

Quality of Life
Negative social consequences of systems (cont.)

- Employment:
• Reengineering work resulting in lost jobs
Moral Dimensions –
- Equity and access—the digital divide:
• Certain ethnic and income groups in the United States less
likely to have computers or Internet access. For example: A
similar digital divide exists in U.S. schools, with schools in
highpoverty areas less likely to have computers, high-quality
educational technology programs, or Internet access availability
for their students.

Quality of Life
Negative social consequences of systems (cont.)

- Health risks:
Moral Dimensions –
• Repetitive stress injury (RSI)
– Largest source is computer keyboards
– Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS)
• Computer vision syndrome (CVS)
– Eyestrain and headaches related to screen use
• Technostress
– Aggravation, impatience, fatigue
Source:

>> Management Information Systems,

Managing the Digital Firm, 13 Edition (2014),
Laudon and Laudon.
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