Ethical and Social Issues in IS

MIS and services

Yidnekachew Kibru, Department of Information systems

Chapter 2
Learning Objectives
▪Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related
to Systems
▪Ethics in an Information Society
▪The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues

• Ethics
• Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as
free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their
behavior
• 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

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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues…
▪Technology can be a double-edged sword:
▪ It can be the source of many benefits (by showing
you ads relevant to your interests)
▪ but it can also create new opportunities for invading
your privacy, and enabling the reckless use of that
information in a variety of decisions about you
▪Search engine marketing is arguably the most
effective form of advertising in history,

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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues…
▪The Web sites you visit track the search engine
queries you enter,
▪ Pages visited,
▪ Web content viewed,
▪ Ads clicked,
▪ Videos watched,
▪ Content shared, and
▪ The products you purchase.
▪Google is the largest Web tracker, monitoring
thousands of Web sites

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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues …

• A model for thinking about ethical, social, and

political issues
• Society as a calm pond
• IT as a 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

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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues …

• Four key technology trends that raise ethical issues

• Doubling of computer power
• More organizations depend on computer systems for critical operations.

• Data storage costs rapidly declining

• Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals.

• Data analysis advances

• Greater ability to find detailed personal information on individuals

• Networking advances and the Internet

• Enables moving and accessing large quantities of personal data

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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues …

▪The introduction of new IT 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.

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Moral Dimensions
▪Information rights and obligations:
▪ What information rights do individuals possess with respect to
themselves? What can they protect?
▪Property rights and obligations
▪ How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a
digital society in which tracing and accounting for ownership are
difficult?
▪Accountability and control
▪ Who can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm
done to individual and collective information and property
rights?

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Moral Dimensions …
▪System quality
▪ What standards of data and system quality should we
demand to protect individual rights and the safety of
society?
▪Quality of life
▪ What values should be preserved in an information-
and knowledge-based society? Which institutions and
values should we protect from violation?

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Ethics
▪Ethics is a concern of humans who have freedom
of choice.
▪Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals
who are responsible for the consequences of
their actions.

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Ethics in an Information Society
• Basic concepts form the underpinning of an
ethical analysis of information systems and
those who manage them
• Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations
for decisions (accepting the consequences of your decision)
• 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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Ethics in an Information Society …
• Ethical analysis: A five-step process
1.Identify and clearly describe the facts
▪ Find out who did what to whom, and where, when, and how
2.Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-
order values involved
▪ The parties to a dispute all claim to be pursuing higher values,
▪ E.g. the need to improve health care record keeping and the need to protect
individual privacy

3.Identify the stakeholders

▪ players in the game who have an interest in the outcome, who have
invested in the situation, etc.
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Ethics in an Information Society …
▪Ethical analysis: A five-step process (cont’d)
4. Identify the options that you can reasonably take
▪ arriving at a good or ethical solution may not always be a
balancing of consequences to stakeholders.

5.Identify the potential consequences of your options

▪ Some options may be ethically correct but disastrous from
other points of view. Other options may work in one instance
but not in other similar instances

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Ethics in an Information Society …
• Candidate Ethical Principles
• 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

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Ethics in an Information Society …
• Candidate Ethical Principles (cont.)
• Utilitarian Principle
• Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value
• Risk Aversion Principle
• Take the action that produces the least harm or least 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

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Ethics in an Information Society…
• 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
• Real-world ethical dilemmas
• One set of interests pitted against another
• E.g. Right of company to maximize productivity of
workers vs. workers right to use Internet for short
personal tasks

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems
• Information rights and obligations
• Privacy
• Claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or
interference from other individuals, organizations, or the state.
• The claim to be able to control information about yourself
• In U.S., privacy protected by:
• First Amendment (freedom of speech)
• Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)
• Additional federal statues
• Privacy Act of 1974

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems..
• 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
• Allow Web sites to develop profiles on visitors
• Web bugs
• Tiny graphics embedded in e-mail messages and Web pages
• Designed to monitor who is reading a message and transmitting that
information to another computer on the Internet
• Spyware
• Surreptitiously installed on user’s computer
• May transmit user’s keystrokes or display unwanted ads

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems
• Technical solutions
• The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)
• Allows Web sites to communicate privacy policies to
visitor’s Web browser – user
• User specifies privacy levels desired in browser
settings
• E.g. “medium” level accepts cookies from first-party
host sites that have opt-in or opt-out policies but rejects
third-party cookies that use personally identifiable
information without an opt-in policy.

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…
• Property Rights: Intellectual Property
• Intellectual property: Intangible property of any kind
created by individuals or corporations
• Three ways that intellectual property is protected
• Trade secret: Intellectual work or product belonging to business, not in the public
domain
• 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

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…
• Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights
• Digital media different from physical media (e.g. books)
• Ease of replication
• Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)
• Difficulty in classifying software
• Compactness
• Difficulties in establishing uniqueness

• Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)

• Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based
protections of copyrighted materials

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…
• Accountability, Liability, Control
• Computer-related liability problems
• If software fails, who is responsible?
• If seen as a part of a machine that injures or harms, software
producer and operator may be liable
• If seen as similar to a book, difficult to hold software
author/publisher responsible
• What should liability be if software is seen as service? Would
this be similar to telephone systems not being liable for
transmitted messages (so-called “common carriers”)

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…
• System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors
• What is an acceptable, technologically feasible level of system
quality?
• Flawless software is economically unfeasible
• 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)

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…
▪Computer crime and abuse
▪ Computer crime: Commission of illegal acts through use
of compute or against a computer system
▪ 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 any country less likely to have
computers or Internet access

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems…

▪Health risks:
▪ Repetitive stress injury (RSI)
▪ Largest source is computer keyboards
▪ Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS)
▪ Computer vision syndrome (CVS)
▪ Technostress
▪ Role of radiation, screen emissions, low-level
electromagnetic fields

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Thank You!

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