Chapter 4

Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Management Information Systems

Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Analyze the relationships among ethical, social, and political issues that are raised by information systems. Identify the main moral dimensions of an information society and specific principles for conduct that can be used to guide ethical decisions. Evaluate the impact of contemporary information systems and the Internet on the protection of individual privacy and intellectual property.

Assess how information systems have affected everyday life.

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Management Information Systems

Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems Does Location Tracking Threaten Privacy?

Problem: New opportunities from new technology and need for greater security. Solutions: Redesigning business processes and products to support location monitoring increases sales and security.

Deploying GPS and RFID tracking devices with a location tracking database enables location monitoring.
Demonstrates ITs role in creating new opportunities for improved business performance Illustrates how technology can be a double-edged sword by providing benefits such as increased sales and security while compromising privacy.
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Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems In the past decade we have seen one of the most ethically challenged period in the history of global business. In the past, the employers used to pay for the legal defense of their employees but now they are encouraged to cooperate with the prosecutors to reduce charges against the firms. These development means that, as a manger or an employee, you will have to decide yourself what constitutes proper legal and ethical conduct

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems ETHICS- refers to the principle of right and wrong that, individual, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors. IS raise new ethical questions because they create opportunities for social change, and thus threaten existing distribution of power, money, rights and obligations.

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Management Information Systems

Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

Ethical, social and political issues are closely linked. A model for thinking about ethical, social, and political issues Five moral dimensions of the information age
Information rights and obligations-know how of information rights and obligations firms and individuals have Property rights and obligations-traditional intellectual property rights be protected in the digital world Accountability and control-who can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm done to individual and collectively System quality-data and system quality should we demand to protect individual rights and safety of society Quality of life-values to be preserved in the information world
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The Relationship Between Ethical, Social, and 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.

Figure 4-1
2007 by Prentice Hall

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 Key technology trends that raise ethical issues

TREND
Computing power doubles every 18 months Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals.

IMPACT
More organizations depend on computer systems for critical operations, which has increased the system errors and poor data quality

Data storage costs rapidly declining

Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals.

Companies can analyze vast quantities of data gathered on individuals to develop detailed profiles of individual behavior. Copying data from one location to another and accessing personal data from remote locations are much easier.

Data analysis advances

Networking advances and the Internet

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 Think of all the ways you generate computer information about yourself-credit card purchases, bank statements, magazine subscriptions, telephone calls, government records etc; Companies with products to sell purchase relevant information to help them more finely target their marketing campaigns. The use of computers to combine data from multiple sources and create electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals is called profiling. Nonobvious relationship awareness NORA
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Ethics in an Information Society

Basic concepts: Responsibility- key element of the ethical action . It

means that you accept the potential costs, duties and obligation for the decisions you make.

Accountability- is a feature of system and social

institution. It means that mechanisms are present to determine who tool responsible actions, who is responsible.

Liability-feature of political system in which body of laws

is in place that permits individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors.
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2007 by Prentice Hall

 Due Process process in which laws are known and

understood and there is an ability to appeal to higher authorities to ensure that the laws are applied correctly

Ethical analysis
Known five step process should help in ethical analysis
Identify and describe the facts clearly Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved Identify the stakeholders Identify the options you can reasonably take Identify the potential consequences of your options

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Candidate Ethical Principles

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (the Golden Rule).Putting yourself into the place of others, and thinking of yourself as the object of the decision, can help you think about fairness in decision making. 2. If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone (Immanuel Kants Categorical Imperative). Ask yourself, If everyone did this, could the organization, or society, survive? 3. If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all (Descartes rule of change). This is the slippery-slope rule: An action may bring about a small change now that is acceptable, but if it is repeated, it would bring unacceptable changes in the long run. In the vernacular, it might be stated as once started down a slippery path, you may not be able to stop.

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 4. Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value (the Utilitarian Principle). This rule assumes you can prioritize values in a rank order and understand the consequences of various courses of action. 5. Take the action that produces the least harm or the least potential cost (Risk Aversion Principle). Some actions have extremely high failure costs of very low probability (e.g., building a nuclear generating facility in an urban area) or extremely high failure costs of moderate probability (speeding and automobile accidents). Avoid these high-failure-cost actions. 6. Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone else unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. (This is the ethical no free lunch rule.)

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 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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2007 by Prentice Hall

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 or organizations, including the state. Information technology threatens individual claims of privacy by making the invasion of privacy cheap, profitable and effective. Most US and European privacy laws are based on FIP ( Fair Information Practices). According to FIP, the individual has an interest in engaging in a transaction, the record keeper needs the information for the transaction, but once the transaction is complete record keeper can not use the information without the individuals consent.

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 The European directive on data protection

Internet challenges to privacy

Cookies- tiny files deposited on the computer hard drive
when a user visits a certain web site.e.g.Amazon.com. Cookies can not identify persons name and addresses, but if a person register himself then the cookie data is combined with this information to identify the visitor

Web bugs-a subtle and surreptitious tool of surveillance.

Embedded in e-mail messages or web pages that are designed to see who is reading the e-mail and transmit the information to another computer

Spyware- secretly install itself by piggybacking on larger

applications on an Internet users computer. It calls out to websites to send banner ads and other unsolicited material

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2007 by Prentice Hall

How cookies identify the Web visitors

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 Google and G-mail, chrome (web browser)Google has been scanning the contents of the messages through its free email service. Profiles re developed on individual users based on the content of their e-mails.

Opt-out and opt-in model- Indian governemnt has

allowed the businesses to use the information for other marketing purposes. US sites has given the option of opt out (permitting of collection of data unless specifically asked not to)

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Technical solutions- P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences)- automatic communication of privacy policies between an e-commerce site and the visitor.
Internet Explorer enable user to adjust their computers to screen out all cookies or let in selected cookies based on specific levels. E.g, the medium level accepts cookies from first party host sites that have opt in and opt out policies, but reject cookies that personally identifiable information without an opt-in policy.

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The P3P standard

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 Property rights: Intellectual property Trade secrets- any intellectual work product- a formula,
device, pattern or compilation of data- used for a business purpose. Software that contain unique elements, procedures, or compilations can be included as a trade secret Copyright-statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property from having their work copied by others for any purpose during his life plus an additional 70 years after his death.

Patents- owner has an exclusive monopoly on the ideas

behind an invention for 20 years

Challenges to intellectual property rights

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

Accountability, liability, and control

If a person is injured by a machine controlled by a software who will be held responsible? Electronic service, permit the offensive material, or should they be held harmless against any liablity fro what user transmits? If the banks software has lost track of money that should have been credited to customers account, then who s liable?

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 Computer-related liability problems

As the publishers, authors are not held responsible for the content of the books etc;. Then should the software producers held accountable?
ATM software as service Telephone systems are not held liable for the messages they carry but the broadcasters and cable operators are subject to wide variety of restrictions and laws.

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 System quality: Data quality and system errors

At what time the system manager say stop testing, we have done all we can to perfect the software? Individuals and organization may be held responsible for the foreseeable consequences which will arise from their erroneous and buggy products Three principal sources of poor system performance are
i) software bugs and errors ii) hardware and facility failures iii) poor input data quality

Though system errrors are reported widely but the common source of system failure is data quality where error rate ranges from 0.5 to 30 percent

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2007 by Prentice Hall

 Quality of life: Equity, access, and boundaries

Balancing power: Center versus periphery
Mainframe computers vs highly decentralized computing empowering the workers

Rapidity of change: Reduced response time to competition- efficient national and international markets Maintaining boundaries: Family, work, and leisure- work umbrella now extends far beyond the eight hour day. Dependence and vulnerability of businesses as are more reliant on information system.

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The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

Computer crime and abuse

Computer crime commission of an illegal act through the use of the computer or against the computer system.
Computer abuse- not illegal but unethical Spam- junk e-mail sent by individual or organization to a mass audience who are not interested in the product Employment: Trickle-down technology and reengineering job loss- redesigning the business processes could potentially cause millions of middle level managers and workers to lose their jobs
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 Equity and access: Increasing racial and social class gaps Health risks: RSI ( repetitive stress injury) - the single largest source of RS is computer keyboard Most common computer related RSI is carpal tunnel syndrome CTS wrist bone injury CVS (Computer vision syndrome), and Technostress- stress due to radiations of computer

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2007 by Prentice Hall

Management Information Systems

Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

The Spamming Problem

This figure shows the major types of products and services hawked through spam e-mail messages and the industries that receive the most spam.

Figure 4-5
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2007 by Prentice Hall