Transcript What is ethics?

What is ethics?
According to Laudon & Laudon,
ethics refers to the principles of right
and wrong that can be used by
individuals acting as free moral
agents to make choices to guide their
behavior.
Ethical and Social Concerns
The development of national digital
superhighway communication
networks widely available to
individuals and businesses poses
many ethical and social concerns.
Info System Impacts
• Whatever information system impacts exist
are a product of instititional, organizational,
and individual actions and behaviors.
• Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative
says that if an action is not right for
everyone to take, then it is not right for
anyone.
Other ethical rules/principles
• If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, then it is
not right to be taken at any time (Descarte)
• One can put values in rank order and understand
the consequences of various courses of action
(Utilitarian) “Take the action that achieves the
higher or greater value.”
• All tangible and intangible objects are owned by
someone, unless specifically stated otherwise.
What is privacy?
• The claim of individuals to be left alone,
free from surveillance or interference from
other individuals or organizations.
• The set of principles governing the
collection and use of information about
individuals is known as FIP
Structured vs. Unstructured
Decisions
• Unstructured decisions are non-routine
decisions in which the decision maker must
provide judgment and evaluations for which
there is no standard procedure.
– Ex: a decision to invest in uncharted territory
• Structured decisions are repetitive and routine
with standard procedures for solutions.
– Ex: facility layout, plant scheduling
Models of Decision making
• Rational model
– Individual has goals/objectives with ranking of all possible
alternative actions. Individual chooses highest alternative
• Bounded Rationality
– Individuals are not assumed to be able to comprehend and
rank all alternatives. Takes the first alternative that moves
towards the goal. Actions not too different than what is
currently happening
• Muddling through: Individuals make limited successive
comparisons with trade-offs among values. Incremental decision
making with agreement among other people as the final test of the
decision.
Organizational Choice Models
• Rational model: Assumes that human and
organizational behavior is based in valuemaximizing calculation with certain
constraints (profit vs. utility)
• Bureaucratic model: The most important
goal is the preservation of the organization,
with reduction of uncertainty a major goal.
Organizational models cont.
• Political model: What occurs in the
organization is a result of power relations
and political interest groups
• Garbage Can model: Assumes that
organizations are not rational and decisions
are accidents
The technical-rational school of
management
• The organization is:
– seen as a closed, mechanical system
• The emphasis is on:
– design of a system
– managing for efficiency
– functions of managers are planning, organizing,
coordinating, deciding, and controlling
Behavioral perspective on
management
• Organization is:
– seen as open, biological organism (like a cell or
animal)
• Characteristics are:
–
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Ability to adapt
Assurance that all parts work together
Members are satisfied and functioning well
Highly fragmented activities, rapid change, no
sweeping policy decisions
Responsibility, Accountability,
and Liability
• Responsibility: accept the potential costs,
duties, and obligations for the decisions
made
• Accountability: allows the determination of
who is responsible
• Liability: permits individuals to recover
damages done to them by responsible
individuals or organizations
Six ethical Principles
• Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you
• Kants Categorical Imperative: if an action is not right for everyone
to take, then it is not right for anyone
• Descartes rule of change: If an action cannot be taken repeatedly,
then it is not right to be taken at any time
• Utilitarian Principle: take the action that achieves the higher or
greater value
• Risk Aversion Principle: take the action that produces the least
harm or the least potential cost.
• No Free Lunch: Virtually all tangible and intangible objects are
owned by someone unless there is specific declaration otherwise
Professional Code of Conduct
• Professional groups take on special rights
and obligations. Regulations which
determine entrance qualifications and
competencies into organizations due to
special claims to knowledge, wisdom and
respect.
Privacy and FIP (fair information
practices)
• Privacy is the claim to be left alone, free
from surveillance or interference from other
individuals or organizations, including the
state.
FIP
• The five principles are:
– There should be no personal record systems whose existence
is secret.
– Individuals have rights of access, inspection, review and
amendment to systems that contain information about them.
– There must be no use of personal information for purposes
other than those for which it was gathered without prior
consent
– Managers of systems are responsible and can be held
accountable and liable for the damage done by systems, for
their reliability and security
– Governments have the right to intervene in the information
relationships among private parties.
Regimes of the Protection of
Intellectual Property Rights
• Trade Secrets: Intellectual work product used for business
purpose, except public domain
• Copyright: a statutory grant that protects creators of
intellectual property against copying by others for any
purpose for 28 yrs. Does not protect underlying ideas,
only work manifestations
• Patents: Grants the owner a monopoly on the ideas behind
invention for 17 yrs. Some times problematic
Let’s look at the Credit Reporting
Bureaus
• It is estimated that consumers are wrongfully turned
down for credit due to serious mistakes which have
been recorded to the Credit bureaus regarding their
credit history. The Crediting Agencies are aware of
these mistakes, yet do little to correct the problems
unless consumers pursue an active, written campaign to
have these mistakes removed. What legal liability do
the credit bureaus have to achieve an acceptable,
technologically feasible level of system quality?
FIP Principles
• Fair Information practices (FIP) principles
include: individuals have rights of access,
inspection, review, and amendment to
systems that contain information about them
Cryptography and the Internet
• Concerns of e-commerce:
– lack of security, reliability, and accountability
– The greatest use of e-commerce today is customer-tobusiness as opposed to business-to-business
• Strong security is:
– hard to implement
– requires eternal, almost obsessive vigilance to maintain.
– Public key encryption is used by most businesses who
conduct business on the web.
Http://www.echonyc.com/~ysue/crypt.html
Security and hackers
One of the most famous hackers gained notoriety at
age 17 when he broke into the military’s NORAD air
defense computer system. He hacked his way into
phone companies, cellular networks, credit bureaus,
university and corporate computers. He was finally
caught two months after he broke into the San Diego
Supercomputer Center.
Security Issues
• Some perceive that hacking has to do with
the belief that all info should be free.
• Most FBI computer crimes were committed
by hackers gaining access to internal
networks through the Internet.
• Once a local area network is hooked up to
the Net, sensitive data in the system
potentially becomes accessible to every
computer on the Net.
Ways to protect one’s system
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Encryption
Firewalls
Digital Pathways
Security software
Security Compromised Systems
• Yes, this means someone is lurking or has
invited themselves in as an unwelcome
guest.
• So, you can do such things as:
– follow the intruder back to this origin
– implement some password scheme
Http://www.echonyc.com/~ysue/crime.html
Fact: 85 to 97 percent of all computer
break-ins are not reported.
• Would you want to do business with a company
whose system has been compromised?
• The Great Arpanet Worm--R. Morris, Jr. wrote a
program that penetrated the country’s poorly
defended computer networks, replicating itself
so fast that it created a nationwide network
gridlock in a matter of days. And then there was
the love virus
But there’s more!
The New California Gold Rush. A
bank employee simply e-mailed
Brinks to tell them to deliver 44 kilos
of gold to a P.O. Box number in
remote California. Someone picked
up the gold--and disappeared.
Hacker’s vengeance
• Garbage dump. Angered by a piece a
Newsday journalist had written about
hackers, the article’s subjects hacked their
way into the root directories of IBM.,
Sprint, and a small Internet provider called
Pipeline to fire thousands of abusive junk
email items to his personal address,
effectively preventing him from accessing
the Internet.
Four Key technological
Trends/Ethical Issues
• The doubling of computer power every 12 months
• Advances in data storage techniques and rapidly declining
storage cost
• Advances in data mining techniques for large databases
• Advances in telecommunications infrastructure like
ISDN/ATM and Internet.
• All this will permit the invasion of privacy on a very large
scale.