UNDERSTANDING ETHICAL, SOCIAL AND

POLITICAL ISSUES RELATED TO IT

 IT SECURITY, ETHICS, AND SOCIETY

 IT has both beneficial

and harmful effects on
society and people
 Manage work activities
to minimize the harmful
effects of IT
 Optimize the beneficial
effects

2
 ETHICS
• Principles of right and wrong

• Assumes individuals are acting

as free moral agents to make
choices to guide their behavior
ETHICAL ISSUES RELATED TO IT

 Info systems raise new ethical questions for

 Individuals
 Improveefficiency
 Cause many to lose jobs

 Societies
 Empowered citizen to better manage public issues
 Enable criminals to commit crime much easier
Information systems and Ethics
 Information
systems raise new ethical
questions because they create opportunities
Intense ( strong) social change,
Threatening existing distributions of power
Money
Rights
Obligations

New kinds of crime

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHICAL, SOCIAL, AND
POLITICAL ISSUES IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY

 Society as a calm pond

 IT as 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 and laws
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHICAL, SOCIAL, AND
POLITICAL ISSUES IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY
FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF THE INFORMATION
AGE
• Information rights and obligations
(about ourselves, organization)

• Property rights and obligations

(protection of intellectual property rights)

• Accountability and control

(who will be held accountable if harm is done)

• System quality (standards of data and system quality)

• Quality of life (preservation of values, culture)

KEY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT RAISE ETHICAL ISSUES

• Changes in technology have some obvious

positive consequences, but also create some
potentially or actual negative consequences.

• Computing power doubles every 18 months:

Dependence on computer systems increases,
and it becomes more cost effective to process
massive amounts of personal information.
KEY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT RAISE ETHICAL ISSUES

 Rapidly declining data storage costs

 Lowers the cost of creating huge databases composed of private
information
 Data-mining advances
 Increases the ability of firms and governments to track the
movement of citizens throughout the life

 Networking advances and the Internet

 Remotely accessing personal data
SOME REAL-WORLD IT ETHICAL DILEMMAS
• Using systems to increase efficiency, and causing
unemployment
• Using systems to monitor employee e-mail to protect
valuable assets, but decreasing employee privacy
• Monitoring employee use of the Internet at work,
decreasing employee privacy

• Using huge databases to aggregate consumer

information, reducing the costs of information, but
increasing the chance of losing personal data to
criminals, terrorists, or others unethical work
PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOLOGY ETHICS
 Proportionality - The good achieved by the technology
must outweigh the harm or risk; there must be no
alternative that achieves the same or comparable benefits
with less harm or risk

 Justice
 The benefits and burdens of the technology should be distributed
fairly
 Those who benefit should bear their fair share of the risks

 Minimized Risk - The technology must be implemented so

as to avoid all unnecessary risk

12