GROUP REPORT ON

Chapter 4:
Ethical & Social Issues in the
Information Systems
SANJAY KUMAR SHARMA
MRIDULA KHANNA
SWATI ROY
RAJ NARAYAN
NIRBHAY
ASHWANI
RAHUL DEV

SUBMITTED TO
PROF. KAMAL PARSAI
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

 I wish my sincere thanks to PROF. KAMAL

PARSAI for giving us the opportunity to present a
report on MIS. This gave us an insight how
theoretical concepts are applied in organizations.

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Outline

 Technology Trends and the Ethical Issues

 The Model
• Social, Ethical and Legal issues of information systems
 Privacy
 Intellectual Property
 Accountability, Liability and Control
 System Quality
 Quality of Life

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 Key Technology Trends that Raise Ethical Issues

Technology Trend Ethical Issues

Computing Power Doubles Every - Dependence on computer systems
18 Months (Moor’s Law) - Processing power facilitates security
breach

Rapidly Declining Data Storage Easy main individual’s info

Costs

Data analysis Advances Analysis of vast quantities of data to

develop detailed profiles of an
individual
Networking Advances and the Remote access to personal data
Internet

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Non-obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)

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The Model

A model for thinking about ethical, social, and

political issues
 Illustrates the dynamics connecting ethical, social,
and political issues
 Identifies the moral dimensions of the information
society, across individual, social, and political
levels of action

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 The relationship between ethical, social,
and political issues in an information society

ADM2372: Management Information Systems 7

Five moral dimensions of the information age

 Information rights and obligations

 Property rights and obligations

 Accountability and control

 System quality

 Quality of life

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Ethics
 Principles of right and wrong

 Can be used by individuals acting as free moral

agents to make choices to guide their behavior

 Have been given new urgency by the use of the

Internet, electronic commerce, and digital
technologies

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Candidate Ethical Principles
 Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you

 Kant’s Categorical Imperative: If an action is not right for

everyone to take, then it is not right for anyone

 Descartes’ rule of change: If an action cannot be taken

repeatedly, then it is not right to be taken at any time

 Utilitarian Principle: Put values in rank order and understand

consequences of various courses of action

 Risk Aversion Principle: Take the action that produces the least
harm or incurs the least cost

 Ethical “No Free Lunch” Rule: All tangible and intangible objects
are owned by creator who wants compensation for the work

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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 Canadian

Medical Association (CMA), the Canadian Bar Association
(CBA), and the Association of Information Technology
Professionals (AITP)

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Some Real-World IT Ethical Dilemmas

 Using systems to increase efficiency, causing

layoffs and personal hardships

 Monitoring employee use of the Internet at work to

increase productivity, decreasing employee
privacy

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 The relationship between ethical, social,
and political issues in an information society

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Information Rights: Privacy
 The right of an individual to protect or disclose any part of
his/her information.

 Claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or

interference from other individuals, organizations, or the state

 While some information is private to a party (e.g. medical

condition, bank account information), it may not be considered
private to another party.

 Fair Information Practices (FIP); U.S. (1973): Set of principles

governing the collection and use of information; the basis of
most North American and European privacy laws

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Principles of Fair Information Practices
 There should be no personal record systems whose existence
is secret.

 Individuals have right of access to systems that contain

information about them.

 There must be no use of personal information for purposes

other than those for which it was gathered.

 Mangers of systems are responsible and can be held

accountable and liable for the damage done by systems for
their reliability and security.

 Governments have the right to intervene in the information

relationships among private parties.

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 Internet Challenges to Privacy
 Cookies
• Tiny files deposited on a hard drive
• Used to identify the visitor and track visits to the Web site
• How it works?
1. User selects a web site to visit
2. User’s computer (client) sends a request to Server
3. The server sends the web page information to client along with a data file (cookie)
which contains user ID, time of visit, what user visited, etc.
4. The user’s computer (client) receives the cookie and saves it on the user’s hard drive
5. Next time, when users wants to visit the same web site, the server uses the cookie
(available on user’s computer) to identify the user.

2 Request
1
User cookie
3 Server
(Client)
4 cookie 5

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Internet Challenges to Privacy (cont’d)
 Web Bugs
• Tiny graphic files embedded in e-mail messages and
Web pages
• Designed to monitor online Internet user behavior

 Spyware
• software that comes hidden in free downloadable software
and tracks your online movements, mines the information
stored on your computer, or uses your computer’s
processor and storage for some task you know nothing
about.
• Spyware is also used to call for ads from third-party
servers, or to divert customers from one site to a
preferred site.

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 The relationship between ethical, social,
and political issues in an information society

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Intellectual Property
 Intellectual Property:
• Intangible property created by individuals or corporations
• Subject to protections under trade secret, copyright, and
patent law

 Three main ways that intellectual property is

protected:
• Trade secret
• Copyright
• Patents

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Trade Secret
 Intellectual work or product belonging to
business, not in the public domain
 Supreme Court test for breach of confidence:
1. information conveyed must be confidential
2. information must have been communicated in
confidence
3. information must have been misused by the party to
whom it was communicated

 Trademark
• A sign that identifies certain goods & services
• Any combination of words, letters, numbers,
drawings, symbols, images, or musical sounds
• Indefinite

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Patent
 Invention
• product or a process that provides a new way of doing
something or offers a new technical solution to a
problem

 Patent:
• Legal document granting the owner an exclusive
monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 17 to 20
years.
• exclusive rights to make, distribute, and sell invention.

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Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights

Ethical issues
• Should you copy for your own use a piece of software or
other digital content that is protected by copyright, trade
secret or patent?

Social issues
• Current intellectual property laws breaking down

Political issues
• Creation of new property protection measures

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 The relationship between ethical, social,
and political issues in an information society

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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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Who is Liable?
 The producer of SW code?
 The producer of the machine who should test the
code,?
 The organization/facility (e.g. Hospital, Bank) where
the damage was done?

 Ethical Issues: Who is morally responsible for consequences of use?

 Social Issues: What should society expect and allow?
 Political Issues: To what extent should government intervene and
protect?

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Computer-Related Liability

 Information Systems executives are responsible for harm

done by systems developed by their staffs.
 When SW is a part of a machine, and the machine harms
someone physically or economically, the producer of the SW
and the operator can be held liable for damages.
 If the SW acts like a book by storing and displaying
information, then it is very difficult (if not impossible) to hold
SW producer liable for their products.
 Historically, print publishers have not been held liable in
accordance with freedom of expression (with the exception of
fraud and defamation)
 Telephone Systems have not been held liable for the
messages transmitted, but Internet Service Providers (AOL,
MSN, etc) can be held liable for the offensive content of the
postings by their users.

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Yahoo Case in France
 Yahoo case in France in 2000, auctioning Nazi-
related materials
• The court ruled that even the server in the US should stop
auctioning Nazi-related stuff (fine: US 10,000 per day)
• Advocate of freedom of speech, and the rule of the
Internet as an open source media.

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 The relationship between ethical, social,
and political issues in an information society

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System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors
 Three principal sources of poor system performance:
SW bugs and errors (there is no perfect SW, no industry
testing standards for producing SW of acceptable performance)
• HW or facility failures
• Poor quality of input data
 Ethical Issues: At what point to release the software/services for
consumption? What are you obliged to know about the quality of
your SW?

 Social Issues: Should people be encouraged to believe systems

are perfect?

 Political Issues: Laws of responsibility and accountability.

 The Standards Council of Canada sets Canadian standards,
including the international ISO 9000 and ISO 14000. (penalties for
failure to abide by the standards are unclear)

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 The relationship between ethical, social,
and political issues in an information society

ADM2372: Management Information Systems 30

 IT and Quality of Life:
Equity, Access, and Boundaries
 Balancing Power: Centre 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:
• Rapidity of technological change gives businesses less time to respond or adjust to
competition

 Maintaining Boundaries: Family, Work, and Leisure

• Hard to maintain boundaries between family, work, and leisure due to a “do
anything anywhere” environment

 Dependence and Vulnerability

• we are so dependent on Info Sys that an outage can affect many aspects of our
daily activities
• 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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Computer Crime and Abuse
 Computer Crime:
• Commission of illegal acts through the use of a computer
or against a computer system
• Example: Hacking, Sniffing

 Computer Abuse:
• Commission of acts involving a computer that may not be
illegal but are considered unethical
• Example: Spamming
• Productivity drain at work: use of computer and Internet
access for non-work related purposes
• Question: does employer have the right to monitor
employees email and internet activities?

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 IT and Quality of Life:
Re-Engineering and Job Lost
 Workers lose their jobs due to automation, re-engineering
the workforce, and outsourcing

 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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CONCLUSION
 The presentation was really fruitful to us. After this
report we are now able to analyze the relationship
among ethical, social and political issues that are
raised by IS. During the course of writing this
report we were able to evaluate the impact of
contemporary IS and internet and protection of
individual privacy and intellectual property.

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