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MS 311
Management Information
Systems (MIS)
Duma, R.
Ethical, Economic and
Email: radsiffi@yahoo.com Social Issues in
Office: CE 13 – CIVE Administration Building
The University of Dodoma
Information Systems
College of Informatics and Virtual Education
Information System Department
@2018

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Open discussion 1(5 minutes)

• Ethics vs Moral? • A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design,
• Intellectual Property? instrument, pattern, commercial method, or
compilation of information not generally known or
• Trademark? reasonably ascertainable by others by which a business
• Trade secret? can obtain an economic advantage over competitors or
customers
• Patent? • Copyright (or author's right) is a legal term used to
• Copyright? describe the rights that creators have over their literary
• Privacy? and artistic works. Works covered by copyright range
from books, music, paintings, sculpture, and films, to
• Integrity? computer programs, databases, advertisements, maps,
• Non repudiation? and technical drawings.

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Open discussion 2(2 minutes) Understanding Ethical and Social

• How IT has challenged some area of ethics, social
life, or legal arrangements?
Issues Related to Systems
• Ethics
• Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as
free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their
behavior
• Information systems and ethics
• Information systems raise new ethical questions
because they create opportunities for:
• Intense social change, threatening existing
distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations
• New kinds of crime

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Understanding Ethical and Social
Issues Related to Systems
• A model for thinking about ethical, social, and political
issues
• Society as a calm pond
• IT as a rock dropped in pond, creating ripples of new
situations not covered by old rules
• Social and political institutions cannot respond
overnight to these ripples — it may take years to
develop etiquette, expectations, laws
• Requires understanding of ethics to make choices in
legally gray areas
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Five Moral Dimensions of the
Information Systems
• Information rights and obligations
o about ourselves, organization
• Property rights and obligations
o protection of intellectual property rights
• Accountability and control
o who will be held accountable if harm is done
• System quality
o standards of data and system quality
• Quality of life
o preservation of values, culture
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Ethics and System Quality:
Data Quality and System Errors
• No software program is perfect, errors will be
made, even if the errors have a low probability of
occurring.
• Errors in Windows operating systems were
notorious. At what point should software “be
shipped?” What kind of disclaimer statements
might be appropriate?
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Technology trends ethical issues
• Four key technology trends that raise ethical
issues
• Computing power doubles every 18 months
• Increased reliance on, and vulnerability to, computer systems
• Data storage costs rapidly declining
• Multiplying databases on individuals
• Data analysis advances
• Greater ability to find detailed personal information on
individuals
• Networking advances and the Internet
• Enables moving and accessing large quantities of personal
data
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The Relationship Between Ethical, Social, and Political
Issues in an Information Society
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Ethics and System Quality:
Data Quality and System Errors cont’d
• No database is without errors.
• According to system quality literatures “most
consumer and government personal
information databases have errors ranging
from 10-20% of the data records being either
inaccurate, incomplete, or ambiguous”.
• How should decision makers treat this kind of
information in order to be fair to data subjects?
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IT and Quality of Life Issues:
Equity, Access, and Boundaries
• Balancing Power: Center Versus Periphery:
• Is IT centralizing decision-making power in
the hands of a few, or is it allowing many
more people to participate in decisions that
affect their lives?
• Rapidity of change: Reduced response time to
competition:
• The business you work for may not be able to
respond to rapidly changing IT-enabled
market places. There goes your job offshore!
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IT and Quality of Life Issues:
Equity, Access, and Boundaries cont’d
• Computer crime:
• Commission of illegal acts through the use of a
computer or against a computer system is on the
increase. Spam is now illegal (a federal and state
felony offense), and phishing to defraud people is also
a felony.
• Computer abuse:
• Unethical but not necessarily illegal acts. Adware
programs that alter a person’s browser are not illegal
but most of us would not want this to happen (without
knowing about it)
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Property Rights Intellectual Property
• Intellectual property: Is the product of mind
• Intangible property of any kind created by
individuals or corporations
• Three ways that intellectual property is protected
• Trade secret: Intellectual work or product
belonging to business, not in the public domain
• Copyright: Statutory grant protecting
intellectual property from being copied for the
life of the author, plus 70 years
• Patents: Grants creator of invention an
exclusive monopoly on ideas behind invention
for 20 years
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IT and Quality of Life Issues:
Equity, Access, and Boundaries cont’d
• Maintaining boundaries: Family, work, and
leisure:
• “Do anything anywhere” environment blurs the
boundaries between work, vacation, and
family time
• Dependence and vulnerability:
• There are few regulatory standards to protect
us from the failure of complex electrical,
communications, and computer networks
upon which we all depend
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IT and Quality of Life Issues:
Equity, Access, and Boundaries cont’d
• Employment: Trickle-down technology and
reengineering job loss:
• The rapid development of the Internet has made it
possible to offshore hundreds of thousands of jobs
from high-wage countries to low- wage countries.
• Reengineering existing jobs using IT also results in
few jobs (generally). While this benefits low-wage
countries enormously, the costs are paid by high-
wage country workers
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Basic Concepts
Responsibility, Accountability, and Liability
• Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs,
duties, and obligations for decisions
• Accountability: Mechanisms for identifying
responsible parties
• Liability: Permits individuals (and firms) to
recover damages done to them
• Due process: Laws are well known and
understood, with an ability to appeal to
higher authorities
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IT: Accountability, Liability, and Control
• IT can challenge our ability to identify who
is responsible for actions involving
systems that injure people.
• IT can make it difficult to assign liability
and restore injured persons.
• IT raises issues about who should control
information systems that have the potential
for injuring citizens.
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Some Real-World IT Ethical Dilemmas
1. Using systems to increase efficiency, and causing
layoffs and personal hardships
2. Using systems to monitor employee e-mail to
protect valuable assets, but decreasing employee
privacy
3. Monitoring employee use of the Internet at work,
decreasing employee privacy
4. Using huge databases to aggregate consumer
information, reducing the costs of granting credit,
but increasing the chance of losing personal data to
criminals, terrorists, or others
5. Etc…
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Ethical principles used to analyze ethical
dilemmas
4. Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that
achieves the greatest value for all concerned
5. Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that
produces the least harm or incurs the least
cost to all concerned
6. Ethical “no free lunch” rule: Assume that all
tangible and intangible objects are owned
by someone else, unless shown the contrary.
If someone has created something of value
to you, that person probably wants
compensation for your use
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Ethical analysis
A five-step process
1. Identify and clearly describe the facts
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
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Ethical principles used to analyze
ethical dilemmas
1. 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,
then it is not right for anyone
3. Descartes’ rule of change: If an action
cannot be taken repeatedly, then it is not
right to be taken at any time
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Professional Codes of Conduct
• Promises by professions to regulate
themselves in the general interest of
society
• Promulgated by associations such as
• the American Medical Association (AMA),
• the American Bar Association (ABA) ,
• Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM) etc.
• IEEE Code of Ethics
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IEEE Code of Ethics

We, the members of the IEEE, in recognition of the importance of our
technologies in affecting the quality of life throughout the world, and
in accepting a personal obligation to our profession, its members and
the communities we serve, do hereby commit ourselves to the
highest ethical and professional conduct and agree:
1. To accept responsibility in making decisions consistent with the
safety, health and welfare of the public, and to disclose promptly
factors that might endanger the public or the environment;
2. To avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible,
and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;
3. To be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on
available data;
4. To reject bribery in all its forms;
5. To improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate
application, and potential consequences;
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IEEE Code of Ethics cont’d
6. To maintain and improve our technical competence and to
undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by
training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent
limitations;
7. To seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to
acknowledge and correct errors, and to credit properly the
contributions of others;
8. To treat fairly all persons regardless of such factors as race,
religion, gender, disability, age, or national origin;
9. To avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or
employment by false or malicious action;
10. To assist colleagues and co-workers in their professional
development and to support them in following this code of
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Data Protection Act Principles Data Protection Act Principles

1. Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully
2. Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more
specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further
processed in any manner incompatible with that
purpose or those purposes.
3. Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not
excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for
which they are processed.
4. Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary,
kept up to date.
5. Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes
shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that
purpose or those purposes.
6. Personal data shall be processed in accordance with
the rights of data subjects under this Act.
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cont’d
7. Appropriate technical and organisational measures
shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful
processing of personal data and against accidental
loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or
territory outside the European Economic Area unless
that country or territory ensures an adequate level of
protection for the rights and freedoms of data
subjects in relation to the processing of personal
data.
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Conditions Relevant to the 1st Exemptions from the Data

Principle Protection Principles
• The data subject (the person whose data is stored) has consented
("given their permission") to the processing; • National Security
• Processing is necessary for 'the performance of a contract (any
processing not directly required to complete a contract would not • Crime, Taxation
be "fair");
• Processing is required under a legal obligation
• Processing is necessary to protect the vital interests of the data
subject's rights;
• Processing is necessary to carry out any public functions;
• Processing is necessary in order to pursue the legitimate interests
of the "data controller" or "third parties" (unless it could
unjustifiably prejudice the interests of the data subject).

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Thank you for your

attention!

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