Review Questions 1. In what ways are ethical, social, and political issues connected? Give some examples.

Ethics refers to principles of right and wrong which individuals use to guide their behavior. Individuals act within a social environment that, in turn, exists within a political environment. Ethical dilemmas are problems that affect society and that often are addressed in the political arena. For example, new computer technology makes it easier to gain private information about individuals, creating an ethical dilemma for the potential user of that information (whether or not to invade the privacy of the individual). Society will respond by demanding new laws to regulate the use of data. Students will be able to give a range of examples of this connection. 2. What are the key technology trends that heighten ethical concerns? Table 5-1 identifies the four key technology trends. These trends include computer power doubling every 18 months, rapid decline in data storage costs, data analysis advances, and networking advances and the Internet. The doubling of computing power every 18 months is creating a growing dependence on systems and a consequent vulnerability to system errors, poor data quality, and failure of critical systems. Advances in data storage techniques and rapidly declining storage costs provide for massive data storage capabilities on individual systems and enable the routine violation of individual privacy. Advances in datamining techniques for large databases allow those who are able to dominate supercomputing capacity (large businesses and governments) to increase their power over individuals through the analysis of massive amounts of data about individuals. Advances in telecommunications infrastructure allow the movement of massive amounts of data at greatly reduced cost, permitting the use of data and, as a result, the invasion of privacy on a scale and precision unimaginable to us now. 3. What are the differences between responsibility, accountability, and liability? Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for the decisions you make. Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions that allows the determination of who is responsible. Liability is a feature of political systems that permits individuals to recover damages done to them by responsible individuals or organizations. 4. What are the five steps in an ethical analysis? The five steps in an ethical analysis are outlined in the Manager's Toolkit. The five steps include (1) identify and describe clearly the facts; (2) define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher order values involved; (3) identify the stakeholders; (4) identify the options you can reasonably take, and (5) identify the potential consequences of your options. 5. Identify and describe six ethical principles. The six ethical principles include the golden rule, Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative, Descartes' rule of change, Utilitarian Principle, Risk Aversion Principle, and ethical "no free lunch" rule. The golden rule suggests doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Kant's Categorical Imperative suggests that if an action is not right for everyone to take, then it is not right for anyone. Descartes' rule of change, also known as the slippery slope rule,

suggests that if an action cannot be taken repeatedly, then it is not right to be taken at any time. The Utilitarian Principle suggests taking the action that achieves the higher or greater value. The Risk Aversion Principle suggests taking the action that produces the least harm or the least potential cost. The ethical "no free lunch" rule says that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. 6. What is a professional code of conduct? When groups of people claim to be professionals, they take on special rights and obligations. As professionals, they enter into even more constraining relationships with employers, customers, and society because of the special claims to knowledge, wisdom, and respect. Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by associations of professionals in order to regulate entrance qualifications and competencies and to establish codes of ethics. 7. What are meant by "privacy" and "fair information practices? Privacy is the claim that individuals have the right to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals or organizations, including the state. Claims to privacy involve the workplace as well as the home. Information technology threatens individual claims to privacy by making the invasion of privacy cheap, profitable, and effective. The fair information practices (FIP) is a set of principles governing the collection and use of information about individuals. The five FIP principles are: (1) notice/awareness; (2) choice/consent; (3) access/participation; (4) security; and (5) enforcement. 8. How is the Internet challenging the protection of individual privacy? Cookies, Web bugs, and other means of collecting information about Internet users can be shared without the Internet user's consent. This allows information that a user may have given voluntarily for a good purpose, say logging into the New York Times site, to be shared with some other site. Spamming or e-mail that uses a users e-mail address is another invasion of privacy. 9. What role can informed consent, legislation, industry self-regulation, and technology tools play in protecting individual privacy of Internet users? Informed consent means that the Web site visitor knowingly permits the collection of data about his/her and his/her visit to the company's Web site. Federal privacy laws help regulate the collection, usage, and disclosure of information in the United States. Table 5-2 lists several of the federal privacy laws in the United States. Businesses have taken some steps, including publishing statements about how their information will be used and sometimes offering an optout right. However, few businesses offer an opt-in approach. Several technology tools are available to combat privacy invasion. Technical solutions enable e-mail encryption, anonymous e-mailing and surfing, and cookie rejection. Table 5-4 lists several privacy tools. Of particular interest is the P3P standard that allows the user to have more control over personal information that is gathered on the Web sites that she visits. 10. What are the three different regimes that protect intellectual property rights? What challenges to intellectual property rights are posed by the Internet?

Three different legal traditions that protect property rights are trade secret, copyright, and patent. A trade secret is any intellectual work product used for a business purpose that can be classified as belonging to that business, provided it is not based on information in the public domain. The drawback to trade secret protection is that once an idea falls into the public domain, it no longer can be protected as a trade secret. A copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property against copying by others for any purpose for a period of 28 years. (For work created on or after January 1, 1978, the intellectual property is protected during the author's lifetime plus 70 years after his death.) The drawback of this protection is that underlying ideas are not protected, only their manifestations in a work. A patent grants the owner a monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years. While patent protection does grant a monopoly on the underlying concepts and ideas, the difficulty is passing stringent criteria of non-obviousness, originality, and novelty. The Internet makes it very easy to widely distribute and reproduce intellectual property. 11. Why is it so difficult to hold software services liable for failure or injury? It is very difficult, if not impossible, to hold software producers liable for their software products because it is only when software acts as a part of a defective product that strict liability pertains. If the software is strictly a service (not part of a product), these laws do not apply. As part of a product, software is still considered to be like books, which historically are protected from liability claims by the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of expression. 12. What is the most common cause of system quality problems? The three principal sources of system quality problems are hardware and facility failures, software bugs and errors, and data quality. However, the most common cause of system quality problems is data quality. According to the 1998 Redman study cited in the textbook, individual organizations report data error rates ranging from 0.5 to 30 percent. 13. Name and describe four "quality of life" impacts of computers and information systems. The textbook describes eight "quality of life" impacts of computers and information systems. These include balancing power, rapidity of change, maintaining boundaries, dependency and vulnerability, computer crime and abuse, employment, equity and access, and health risks. Balancing power describes the shift toward highly decentralized computing, coupled with an ideology of "empowerment" of thousands of workers and decentralization of decision making to lower organizational levels. The problem is that the lower-level worker involvement in decision making tends to be trivial. Key policy decisions are as centralized as in the past. The rapidity of change impact suggests that information systems have increased the efficiency of the global marketplace. As a result, businesses no longer have many years to adjust to competition. Businesses can now be wiped out very rapidly, and along with them, jobs. The maintaining boundaries impact suggests that portable computers and telecommuting have created the condition where people can take their work anywhere with them and do it at any time. As a result, workers find that their work is cutting into family time, vacations, and leisure, weakening the traditional institutions of family and friends and blurring the line between public and private life.

The dependency and vulnerability impact suggests that businesses, governments, schools, and private associations are becoming more and more dependent on information systems, and so they are highly vulnerable to the failure of those systems. The computer crime and abuse impact suggests that computers have created new opportunities for committing crimes and have themselves become the target of crimes. The employment impact suggests that redesigning business processes could potentially cause millions of middle-level managers and clerical workers to lose their jobs. Worse, if reengineering actually works as claimed, these workers will not find similar employment because the demand for their skills will decline. The equity and access impact suggests that access to computer and information resources is not equitably distributed throughout society. Access is distributed inequitably along racial, economic, and social class lines (as are many other information resources). Poor children attending poor school districts are less likely to use computers at school. Children from wealthy homes are five times more likely to use PCs for schoolwork than poor children. Whites are three times more likely to use computers at home for schoolwork than African-Americans. Potentially, we could create a society of information haves and have-nots, further increasing the social cleavages in our society. Health risks have been attributed to computers and information technologies. For instance, business now spends $20 billion a year to compensate and treat victims of computer-related occupational diseases. Those illnesses include RSI (repetitive stress injury), CVS (computer vision syndrome), and technostress. 14. What is technostress, and how would you identify it? Technostress is defined as stress induced by computer-use. Its symptoms are aggravation, hostility towards humans, impatience, and enervation. 15. Name three management actions that could reduce RSI. Management can reduce RSI (repetitive stress injury) by using workstations (mainly keyboards) designed for a neutral wrist position (using a wrist rest to support the wrist). Use of proper monitor stands and footrests will contribute to proper posture and so reduce RSI, as will allowing (or requiring) employees to take frequent breaks from their work to walk around. Finally, use of new, ergonomically designed keyboards will also help.

4.How effective is Carnivore as a terrorism and crime-prevention tool?

The answers should be relatively clear. Those who are amateurs at electronic communication can probably be caught if they use e-mail for criminal (including terrorist) reasons. However the case study shows that alternative ways of communicating messages, including e-mail, exist and are probably being used by criminals. 5. State your views on ways to solve the problems of collecting the key data the FBI can gain through Carnivore without interfering with the privacy of people not related to the crime involved. The case study offers at least one alternative the control of Carnivore-type software by the ISPs, although this can still be misused by the ISP. Encourage your students to come up with thoughtful, creative ideas. The alternative ways that the students suggest must be examined carefully to see if they are actually possible, and if they can be misused. Again, students will struggle with the difficult issues of solving privacy problems, and come to understand that agreement on these issues is difficult, if not impossible, leading to a discussion of majority and minority in a democratic society.