Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems Flashcards
What are ethics?
Ethics are principles of right and wrong that free moral agents use to make choices
What are the five moral dimensions of the information age?
- Information rights and obligations
- Property rights and obligations
- System quality
- Accountability and control
- Quality of life
What are the key technology trends raising ethical issues?
- Doubling computer power every 18 months
- Data storage costs rapidly decrease
- Data analysis advances: profiling accuracy
- Networking advances: cost of data accessibility dropped
- Mobile devices proliferate
- Increased reliance on AI in decision making, ignoring ethics
What is responsibility?
Responsibility is accepting potential consequences of your decisions.
What is accountability?
These are mechanims that can determine who took action and who is responsible
What is liability?
The possibility to recover damages done to you by other actors
What is due process?
A process where laws are known and appeal is possible
What are the steps in an ethical analysis?
- Identify and describe facts clearly
- Define conflict and identify higher-order values involved
- Identify stakeholders
- Identify options you can reasonably take
- Identify consequences of your options
What is the golden rule?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
What is Kant’s categorical imperative?
If an action is not right for everyone to take it is not right for anyone to take
What is the slippery slope rule?
If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all
What is the utilitarian principle?
take action that achieves highest value for most people
What is the ethcial no-free-lunch rule?
Assume all objects are owned by someone else unless specified otherwise
What is the risk-aversion principle?
Take action that creates the least harm/lowest costs
What is privacy?
Privacy is the claim of individuals to be left alone. Information systems make privacy invasion cheap, profitable and effective
What is the Fair Information Practices act?
This is a set of principles governing collection and use of individual information
What is the General Data Protection Regulation?
This is a framework for protection personally identifiable data
What is a safe harbor?
private self-regulating policy that meets objectives of regulation but does not involve government enforcement
What is a web beacon?
An image that keeps records of online clickstreams
What are cookies?
When user visits a website, a small text file is placed on website server on his computer that identify visistor’s web browser software as well as other information
What is adware?
Calls out websites to send ads to users
What is spyware?
This is intrusive software that tracks browsing habits
What are opt-out models?
These models of consent allow data collection until user asks not to be tracked anymore
What are opt-in models?
These are models where every user has to give consent before websites are able to track user
What is intellectual property?
These are products of the mind created by individuals/groups.
What is copyright?
Copyright protects the owners of IP from having their work copied
What is a patent?
A patent grants exclusive monopoly on ideas behind an invention for a period of time. Key concepts:
originality, novelty and invention
What are trademarks?
Marks, symbolds etc used to distinguish products in the marketplace
What are trade secrets?
Any intellectual work product used for business purposes can be classified as a trade secret. Grants badly protected monopoly.
What is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)?
This act makes it illegal to avoid technology-based protections of copyrighted materials.
Three principal sources of poor system performance?
- Software bugs and errors
- Hardware/ facility failures caused by natural/other causes
- Poor input data quality
What is computer crime?
Commission of illegal acts by using a computer
What is computer abuse?
commission of acts that are legal but considered unethical
What is the digital divide?
Division between higher- and lower income families where higherincome families do have access to computers and the internet and poor families don’t
What are consequences of information systems for the quality of life?
- Market power concentration Big Tech
- Inequity in access to digital tools
- Job loss and Job reengineering
- Reduced response time to competition
- Reduced boundaries work, family and leisure
- Physical, mental and cognitive health risks.
