TMI2053 Information Systems

in Organisations
Learning Unit 10:
Ethics and Social Issues in Information Systems
 What ethical, social, and political issues are raised by
information systems?

What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide

ethical decisions?

Learning
Objectives Why do contemporary information systems technology
and the Internet pose challenges to the protection of
individual privacy and intellectual property?

How have information systems affected laws for

establishing accountability and liability and the quality of
everyday life?
 What ethical, social, and political issues are raised
by information systems?
• A Model for Thinking about Ethical, Social, and Political
Issues
• Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age
• Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues
Outline What specific principles for conduct can be used to
guide ethical decisions?
• Basic Concepts: Responsibility, Accountability, and Liability
• Ethical Analysis
• Candidate Ethical Principles
• Professional Codes of Conduct
• Some Real-World Ethical Dilemmas
 Why do contemporary information systems technology
and the Internet pose challenges to the protection of
individual privacy and intellectual property?
• Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom in the Internet Age
• Property Rights: Intellectual Property

Outline How have information systems affected laws for

establishing accountability, liability, and the quality of
everyday life?
• Computer-Related Liability Problems
• System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors
• Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries
• Health Risks: RSI, CVS, and Cognitive Decline
 Opening Chapter Case Study:
Content Pirates Sail the Web

• Problem: Pirated content costs

the U.S. economy $58 billion a year, including lost
jobs and taxes.

• Solutions: Search engine algorithms to prevent pirated

content appearing on search engines.

• Crawlers find pirated content and notify content users.

• New products and services to compete with the appeal of
pirated content.
 Case Study: Content Pirates Sail the Web

• NBC uses crawlers to find unauthorized content and block videos on

YouTube; Internet service providers slow Web access and enforce penalties
for downloaders.

• Demonstrates IT’s role in both enabling and preventing content piracy

• Illustrates the value of new IT-enabled products to counter the appeal of
pirated content.
Case Study: Content Pirates Sail the Web
 What ethical, social, and political issues are raised
by information systems?

• Recent cases of failed ethical judgment in business

• Barclay’s Bank, GlaxoSmithKline
• In many, information systems used to bury decisions from public
scrutiny
• Ethics
• Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral
agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors
 What ethical, social, and political issues are raised
by information systems?

• Information systems and ethics

• Information systems raise new ethical questions
because they create opportunities for:
• Intense social change, threatening existing
distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations
• New kinds of crime
 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 and political institutions cannot respond overnight to

these ripples—it may take years to develop etiquette,
expectations, laws
• Requires understanding of ethics to make choices in legally gray areas
 The Relationship among Ethical, Social, Political Issues in an
Information Society

The introduction of new

information technology has
a ripple effect, raising new
ethical, social, and political
issues that must be dealt
with on the individual,
social, and political levels.
These issues have five
moral dimensions:
information rights and
obligations, property rights
and obligations, system
quality, quality of life, and
accountability and control.
 Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age

1 • Information rights and obligations

2 • Property rights and obligations

3 • Accountability and control

4 • System quality

5 • Quality of life
 Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues
Doubling of More organizations depend on computer systems
computer for critical operations
power

Rapidly Organizations can easily maintain detailed

declining databases on individuals
data storage
costs
Networking Copying data from one location to another and
advances accessing personal data from remote locations
are much easier
and the
Internet
 Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues

Combining data from multiple

sources to create dossiers of
Profiling
detailed information on
individuals
Advances in
data analysis Combining data from multiple
techniques Nonobvious
relationship sources to find obscure
awareness hidden connections that
might help identify criminals
(NORA) or terrorists

Mobile device Tracking of

individual cell
growth phones
 Nonobvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)

NORA technology can

take information about
people from disparate
sources and find
obscure, nonobvious
relationships.

It might discover, for

example, that an
applicant for a job at a
casino shares a
telephone number with
a known criminal and
issue an alert to the
hiring manager.
 Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to
Systems

Credit card purchases

can make personal
information available
to market
researchers,
telemarketers, and
direct-mail
companies. Advances
in information
technology facilitate
the invasion of
privacy.
Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues
 What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical
decisions?

• Ethical analysis: A five-step process

1 2 3 4 5
Identify and clearly Define the conflict Identify the Identify the options Identify the
describe the facts. or dilemma and stakeholders. that you can potential
identify the higher- reasonably take. consequences of
order values your options.
involved.
 What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical
decisions?

• Basic concepts for ethical analysis

Responsibility Accountability Liability Due process

• Accepting the • Mechanisms for • Permits individuals • Laws are well

potential costs, identifying (and firms) to known and
duties, and responsible parties recover damages understood, with
obligations for done to them an ability to appeal
decisions to higher
authorities
 What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide
ethical decisions?
• Candidate Ethical Principles
Do unto others as you would
Golden Rule
have them do unto you.

Immanuel Kant’s If an action is not right for

Categorical everyone to take, it is not right
Imperative for anyone.

Descartes’ Rule of If an action cannot be taken

repeatedly, it is not right to take
Change at all.
 What specific principles for conduct can be used to
guide ethical decisions?

• Candidate Ethical Principles (cont.)

Risk Ethical “No
Utilitarian
Aversion Free Lunch”
Principle
Principle Rule

Assume that virtually all

tangible and intangible
Take the action that Take the action that
objects are owned by
achieves the higher or produces the least harm
someone unless there is
greater value. or potential cost.
a specific declaration
otherwise.
 What specific principles for conduct can be used to guide ethical
decisions?
• Professional codes of conduct
• Promulgated by associations of professionals
• E.g., AMA, ABA, AITP, ACM
• Promises by professions to regulate themselves in the general
interest of society
• E.g., avoiding harm to others, honoring property rights (including
intellectual property), and respecting privacy are among the General Moral
Imperatives of the ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
• Real-world ethical dilemmas
• One set of interests pitted against another
• E.g., right of company to maximize productivity of workers versus workers
right to use Internet for short personal tasks
 Some Real-World Ethical Dilemmas

• Using information technology to reduce size of

workforce
• Voice recognition software

• Monitoring workers activities on the computer

• Facebook sells access to users’ newsfeed based on
personal information users subscriber information
to advertisers
 Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom in the
Internet Age

• Privacy:
• 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.

• In the United States, privacy protected by:

• First Amendment (freedom of speech)
• Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)
• Additional federal statues (e.g., Privacy Act of 1974)
 Fair information practices

• Set of principles governing the use of information

• Basis of most U.S. and European privacy laws
• Restated and extended by FTC in 2009 to provide guidelines for behavioral targeting
• Used to drive changes in privacy legislation
• COPPA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA
• Two major divisive issues
• Opt-in policy
• National Do-Not-Track lists
 FTC FIP principles
• Notice/awareness (core principle)
• Web sites must disclose practices before collecting data.
• Choice/consent (core principle)
• Consumers must be able to choose how information is used for secondary
purposes.
• Access/participation
• Consumers must be able to review, contest accuracy of personal data.
• Security
• Data collectors must take steps to ensure accuracy, security of personal
data.
• Enforcement
• Must be mechanism to enforce FIP principles.
 European Directive on Data Protection

• Companies must inform people information is collected and disclose how it is stored and used.
• Requires informed consent of customer.
• EU member nations cannot transfer personal data to countries without similar privacy
protection
• Proposed new changes would required all companies operating in Europe to comply with user
consent rules
• U.S. businesses use safe harbor framework.
• Self-regulating policy and enforcement that meets objectives of government legislation but does not
involve government regulation or enforcement.
 Internet Challenges to Privacy

• Cookies
• Tiny files downloaded by Web site to visitor’s hard drive.
• Identify visitor’s browser and track visits to site.
• Super cookies (Flash cookies)
• Web beacons (Web bugs)
• Tiny graphics embedded in e-mail messages and Web pages
• Monitor who is reading e-mail message or visiting site
• Spyware
• Surreptitiously installed on user’s computer
• May transmit user’s keystrokes or display unwanted ads
• Google services and behavioral targeting
 How Cookies Identify Web Visitors

Cookies are written by

a Web site on a
visitor’s hard drive.
When the visitor
returns to that Web site,
the Web server
requests the ID number
from the cookie and
uses it to access the
data stored by that
server on that visitor.
The Web site can then
use these data to
display personalized
information.
 Why do contemporary information systems technology and the
Internet pose challenges to the protection of individual privacy and
intellectual property?

• The United States allows businesses to gather transaction

information and use this for other marketing purposes.
• Online industry promotes self-regulation over privacy
legislation.
• However, extent of responsibility taken varies:
• Statements of information use
• Opt-out models selected over opt-in
• Online “seals” of privacy principles
• Most privacy policies are difficult to understand
 Technical solutions

• E-mail encryption
• Anonymous browsing tools
• Cookie prevention and management
• Browser features
• “Private” browsing
• “Do not track” feature
• For the most part, these solutions fail in to prevent users from being tracked from
site to site
 Property Rights: Intellectual Property

• Intellectual property: intangible property of any kind

created by individuals or corporations
• Three main ways that intellectual property is protected

Trade secret Copyright Patents

intellectual work or statutory grant grants creator of

protecting intellectual invention an exclusive
product belonging
property from being monopoly on ideas
to business, not in copied for the life of the behind invention for
the public domain author, plus 70 years 20 years
 Property Rights: Intellectual Property
• Challenges to intellectual property rights
• Digital media different from physical media (e.g., books)
• Ease of replication
• Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)
• Ease of alteration
• Difficulty in classifying software
• Compactness
• Difficulties in establishing uniqueness
• Closed environments (Amazon, Kindle)
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
 Accountability, liability, control
• Computer-related liability problems
• If software fails, who is responsible?
• If seen as part of machine that injures or harms,
software producer and operator may be liable.
• If seen as similar to book, difficult to hold
author/publisher responsible.
• What should liability be if software seen as service?
Would this be similar to telephone systems not being
liable for transmitted messages?
 System quality: data quality and system errors
• What is an acceptable, technologically feasible level of
system quality?
• Flawless software is economically unfeasible

Three principal • Software bugs, errors

sources of poor • Hardware or facility failures
system • Poor input data quality (most common
source of business system failure)
performance
 Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries

• Negative social consequences of systems

• Balancing power: although computing power decentralizing, key
decision making remains centralized
• Rapidity of change: businesses may not have enough time to
respond to global competition
• Maintaining boundaries: computing, Internet use lengthens work-
day, infringes on family, personal time
• Dependence and vulnerability: public and private organizations
ever more dependent on computer systems
 The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

Although some
people enjoy the
convenience of
working at home,
the do anything
anywhere
computing
environment can
blur the traditional
boundaries between
work and family
time.
 Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries

• Computer crime and abuse

• Computer crime: commission of illegal acts through use of compute
or against a computer system—computer may be object or
instrument of crime
• Computer abuse: unethical acts, not illegal
• Spam: high costs for businesses in dealing with spam
• Employment:
• Reengineering work resulting in lost jobs
• Equity and access—the digital divide:
• Certain ethnic and income groups in the United States less
likely to have computers or Internet access
 Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries
• Health risks:
• Repetitive stress injury (RSI)
• Largest source is computer keyboards
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS)
• Computer vision syndrome (CVS)
• Eyestrain and headaches related to screen use
• Technostress
• Aggravation, impatience, fatigue
The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

Repetitive stress
injury (RSI) is the
leading occupational
disease today.
The single largest
cause of RSI is
computer keyboard
work.
 References

• Laudon, K. & Laudon, J. (2015). Essentials of MIS,

Global Edition (11th ed.). England: Pearson Education
Limited.