ISF Flashcards
What is Ethics?
Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors.
What are the new ethical questions that information systems raise?
- New kinds of crimes
- Intense social change, threatening existing distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations
What are the key Technology Trends that Raise Ethical Issues ?
- Computing power doubles every 18 months
- Data storage costs rapidly decline
- Data analysis advances
- Networking advances
- Mobile device growth impact
Give examples of real-world ethical dilemmas :
- Monitoring employees
- Facebook monitors users and sells information to advertisers and app developers
What are the steps to ethical analysis?
- Identify and clearly describe the facts.
- Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved.
- Identify the stakeholders.
- Identify the options that you can reasonably take.
- Identify the potential consequences of your options.
What are the candidate Ethical Principles ?
With an explanation on each one
- Golden Rule
– Do unto others as you would have them do unto you - Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative
– If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone - Descartes’ Rule of Change
– If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all - Utilitarian Principle
– Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value - Risk Aversion Principle
– Take the action that produces the least harm or potential cost - Ethical “No Free Lunch” Rule
– Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise
Give examples on recent cases of faild ethical judgment in business
- General Motors, Barclay’s Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Takata Corporation
- In many, information systems used to bury decisions from public scrutiny
Give a Model for Thinking about Ethical, Social, and Political Issues.
- Society as a calm pond, IT as rock dropped in pond, creating ripples of new situations not covered by old rules, Social (family, education, organization) and political institutions cannot respond overnight to these ripples—it may take years to develop etiquette, expectations, laws
what do we need to have to go about Ethical, Social, and Political Issues in the mean time?
Requires understanding of ethics to make choices in legally gray areas (in the
meantime)
What are the Five Moral Dimensions of the
Information Age ?
- Information rights and obligations (individual and organizations)
- Property rights and obligations (intellectual property rights in a digital society)
- Accountability and control (who is accountable for the harm done to individual, information and property rights)
- System quality (what standards of data and system quality we should demand to protect individual rights and the safety of society?)
- Quality of life (values preserved in the society, which institute we should protect? Cultural values and practices supported by the IT)
what are the Advances in Data Analysis Techniques ?
Explain each one
- Profiling
– Combining data from multiple sources to create dossiers of detailed information on individuals - Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA)
– Combining data from multiple sources to find obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists
Give examples on how Advances in Data Analysis Techniques could be applied.
- an applicant for a job at a company shares a telephone number with a known criminal and as such issue an alert to the hiring manager.
- Airline company identifying potential terrorists attempting to board a plane.
- Government identifying potential terrorists by monitoring phone calls.
what specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical decisions ?
Expalin each one
- Responsibility
– Accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations for decisions made by individuals - 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
What are the main professional Codes of conducts ?
Give examples when relevent
- Promulgated by associations of professionals
– American Medical Association (AMA)
– American Bar Association (ABA)
– Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - Promises by professions to regulate themselves in the general interest of society
When can real-world ethical dilemmas happen ?
When One set of interests pitted against another
what is privacy?
Explain
- Claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals, organizations, or state; claim to be able to control information about yourself
How does the United States protect privacy in the Internet?
- First Amendment (freedom of speech and association)
- Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)
- Additional federal statues (e.g., Privacy Act of 1974)
what are the FTC FIP principles?
Explain age principle
- Notice/awareness (core principle)
– website must disclose their information practices before collecting data - Choice/consent (core principle) – choice allowing consumer to choose how their information will be used for secondary purposes
- Access/participation
– consumers to review and contest the accuracy and completeness of data collected about them - Security
– consumer data is secured - Enforcement
– enforce the FIP (i.e. self regulation….etc)
what is FIP?
FIP is a set of principles governing the collection and use of information about individuals
What is FIP based on?
FIP is based on notion of mutuality of interest between the record holder (i.e. business/government) and the individual
what are The countries that are based on FIP the most?
most American and European privacy laws are based on FIP
What are the challenges to privacy in the internet?
- Cookies
- Web beacons
- Spyware
- Google services and behavioral targeting
- The United States allows businesses to gather transaction information and use this for other marketing purposes (without user’s approval)
- Opt-out vs. opt-in model
- Online industry promotes self-regulation over privacy legislation.
– Complex/ambiguous privacy statements
– Opt-out models selected over opt-in
– Online “seals” of privacy principles – certifying web sites adhering to certain privacy principles
what are cookies?
small text files deposited on computer hard drive when user visits website
– Identify browser and track visits to site
– Super cookies (Flash cookies): installed when playing a flash video; cant be easily deleted
what’s spyware?
– Surreptitiously installed on user’s computer
– May transmit user’s keystrokes or display unwanted ads
what are web beacons?
web bugs or tracking files
– Tiny graphics embedded in e-mails and web pages
– Monitor who is reading e-mail message or visiting site (monitor online behavior)
what are the technical solution to protect user privacy during interactions with websites
- E-mail encryption
- Anonymity tools
- Anti-spyware tools
- Browser features
– “Private” browsing :
privacy feature in some web browsers to disable browsing history and the web cache. This allows a person to browse the Web without storing local data that could be retrieved at a later date
– “Do not track” options :
let you tell every website you visit, their advertisers, and content providers that you don’t want your browsing behavior tracked.
what is the overall result of technical solutions
Overall, technical solutions have failed to protect users from being tracked from one site to another
What is intellectual property?
Intangible property of any kind created by individuals or corporations
What are the three main ways that intellectual property is protected?
Explain
- Trade secret
– intellectual work or product belonging to business (not based on the information in the public domain) i.e. formula, device, pattern - 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
What are the differences in digital media from physical media that pose challenges to intellectual property rights
- Ease of replication
- Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)
- Ease of alteration
- Compactness
- Difficulties in establishing uniqueness
What is DMCA? and what it does?
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based protections of copyrighted materials. i.e. ISP are required to take down sites of copyright infringers they are hosting once the ISPs are notified of the problem
If software fails, who is responsible?
- If seen as part of a machine that injures or harms, software producer and operator may be liable.
- If seen as similar to book, difficult to hold author/publisher responsible.
- If seen as a service? Would this be similar to telephone systems not being liable for
transmitted messages?
Why is Flawless software (perfect) unfeasible?
- Because it is economically unfeasible (high cost and no one then can afford it)
What are Three principal sources of poor system performance?
- Software bugs, errors
- Hardware or facility failures
- Poor input data quality (most common source of business system failure)
What are the Negative social consequences of systems?
- Balancing power: center versus periphery i.e. google, twitter, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon
- Rapidity of change: reduced response time to competition not enough time to respond to global competitors (lead to loose your business and job)
- Maintaining boundaries: family, work, and leisure (i.e. do anything anywhere anytime)
- Dependence and vulnerability (all depend on IS and as such they are vulnerability to system fails)
- Computer crime and abuse (i.e. spam)
What is CAN-SPAM Act of 2003?
it require commercial messages to display accurate subject
lines, identify the true senders and offer recipients an easy way to remove their names from email lists
What are the consequences on employment due to IS?
end result of continuing advances in information technology will be
- rising unemployment and a small number of elite corporate professionals
- Trickle-down technology (i.e. AI, IoT, robotics…etc)
- Reengineering job loss
What are the consequences on Equity and access due to IS?
- Increasing racial and social class cleavages
- The digital divide (does everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in the
digital age?)
What are the consequences on health due to IS?
- Repetitive stress injury (RSI)
- Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS)
- Computer vision syndrome (CVS)
- Technostress
What is an ERP system?
- Suite of integrated software modules and a common central database
- Collects data from many divisions of firm for use in nearly all of firm’s internal business activities
- Information entered in one process is immediately available for other processes