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Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Chapter 4

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical 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?
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 everyday life?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Recent cases of failed ethical judgment in business:
Barclay’s Bank, IBM, Walmart (building permits.)
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

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in 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

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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

THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG ETHICAL, SOCIAL, POLITICAL ISSUES IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Five moral dimensions of the information age:
Information rights and obligations. What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to themselves?
Property rights and obligations. How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society.
Accountability and control. Who can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm done ?
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?

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Key technology trends that raise ethical issues
Doubling of computer power
More organizations depend on computer systems for critical operations.
our dependence on systems and our vulnerability to system errors and poor data quality have increased.
Rapidly declining data storage costs
Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals.
Networking advances and the Internet
Copying data from one location to another and accessing personal data from remote locations are much easier.

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Advances in data analysis techniques
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
Mobile device growth
Tracking of individual cell phones

Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

In 2011, the two largest credit card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc.,

were planning to link credit card purchase information with consumer social

network and other information to create customer profiles that could be sold to

advertising firms.

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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.

Figure 4-2

NONOBVIOUS RELATIONSHIP AWARENESS (NORA)

for example, instantly discover a man at an airline ticket counter who shares a phone number with a known terrorist before that

person boards an airplane.

NORA can take information about people

from many disparate sources, such as employment applications, telephone

records, customer listings, and “wanted” lists, and correlate relationships

to find obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or

terrorists

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals who are responsible for the consequences of their actions.
Basic concepts for ethical analysis
Responsibility:
Accepting the potential costs, duties, and obligations for decisions
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 to ensure that the laws are applied correctly.

Ethics in an Information Society

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Five-step ethical analysis

Identify and clearly describe the facts.

Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved:

Dilemma: two diametrically opposed courses of action that support worthwhile values.

Identify the stakeholders:

who have an interest in the outcome

Identify the options that you can reasonably take.

You may find that none of the options satisfy all the interests involved

Identify the potential consequences of your options.

Ethics in an Information Society

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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.
Ask yourself, “If everyone did this, could the organization, or society, survive?”
Descartes’ Rule of Change
If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all.
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

Ethics in an Information Society

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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 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.
If something someone else has created is useful to you, it has value, and you should assume the creator wants compensation for this work.

Ethics in an Information Society

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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)

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Fair information practices:
Set of principles governing the collection and use of information
Basis of most U.S. and European privacy laws
Based on mutuality of interest between record holder and individual
Restated and extended by FTC in 1998 to provide guidelines for protecting online privacy
Used to drive changes in privacy legislation
Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011
the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), requiring Web sites to obtain parental permission before collecting information on children under the age of 13.

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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 and contest accuracy of personal data.

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

FTC FIP principles (cont.)
Security
Data collectors must take steps to ensure accuracy, security of personal data.
Enforcement
Must be mechanism to enforce FIP principles.

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

European Directive on Data Protection:
apply to all companies providing services in Europe, and require Internet companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, and others
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 (e.g., the United States).
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.
U.S. businesses would be allowed to use personal data from EU

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Internet challenges to privacy:
Cookies
Identify browser and track visits to site
the site will welcome you by name and recommend other books of interest based on your past purchases
Super cookies (Flash cookies)
Web beacons (Web bugs)
Tiny graphics embedded in e-mails 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

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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.

Figure 4-3

HOW COOKIES IDENTIFY WEB VISITORS

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

The United States allows businesses to gather transaction information and use this for other marketing purposes.
An opt-out model permits the collection of personal information until the consumer specifically requests that the data not be collected.
an opt-in model of informed consent in which a business is prohibited from collecting any personal information
Online industry promotes self-regulation over privacy legislation.
However, extent of responsibility taken varies:
Complex/ambiguous privacy statements
Opt-out models selected over opt-in
Online “seals” of privacy principles

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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: intellectual work or product belonging to business, not in the public domain
Software that contains novel or unique elements, procedures, or compilations
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
in 2011, Apple sued Samsung for violating its patents for iPhones, iPads, and iPods.

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in 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 Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based protections of copyrighted materials

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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?
ATM machines are a service provided to bank customers
Would this be similar to telephone systems not being liable for transmitted messages?

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in 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)

The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

Quality of life: Equity, access, 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

like Google, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft have come to dominate the collection and analysis of personal private information of all citizens

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Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems

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

4.*

Management Information Systems

Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems