Management Information System

Explain that NORA is used by both the government and the private sector for its profiling capabilities. Ask students to provide potential examples of NORA (other than the one mentioned in the caption) for both governmental and business purposes. One such example might be an airline identifying potential terrorists attempting to board a plane. Another might be government identifying potential terrorists by monitoring phone calls.

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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

Principles to Guide Ethical Decisions

Explain that information systems do not exist in a vacuum and that these concepts are instrumental in understanding the impact of systems and measuring their success. Ask students why liability and due process are such important ethical concepts? (A rough answer would be that they provide recourse to individuals negatively effected by mismanagement of information systems, providing incentive to “play by the rules”.)

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Five-step ethical analysis

Identify and clearly describe the facts.

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

Identify the stakeholders.

Identify the options that you can reasonably take.

Identify the potential consequences of your options.

Principles to Guide Ethical Decisions

Do students believe that any aspect of ethical analysis is lacking from this process? If so, what? Can students offer a brief example of an ethical dilemma and how they would resolve it using this process? One class exercise is to work with students to identify an ethical situation they are aware of, or that may have been in the news. Then, go through the ethical analysis described in the slide to illustrate the process of analyzing an ethical situation.

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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.

Principles to Guide Ethical Decisions

Ensure students understand the difference between the categorical imperative and the rule of change. Briefly, the difference is that the categorical imperative spans the entirety of the populace, whereas the rule of change applies to the decisions of one person over time. For example, the categorical imperative applies to an employee who tries to steal money from his employer. He shouldn’t do this, because if all employees attempted to do so, the company would fail. The rule of change applied to the same situation might run as follows: although the employee’s stealing one dollar from the company would not lead to any true problem, repeatedly stealing one dollar, or stealing a lot of dollars, would be unacceptable and ultimately lead to the destruction of the company.

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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.

Principles to Guide Ethical Decisions

How does the “no free lunch” rule relate to copyrights, patents, and trademarks? (These concepts are discussed in later slides.)

Explain that the appearance of unethical behavior is as harmful as actual unethical behavior at times, so adherence to these principles are critical. In an age of “open source software” how does the principle of “no free lunch” work out? Open source software is an example of an economic good which is licensed by the creator for distribution often without charge, or even attribution. In this case, there is a “free lunch.” But it occurs because the creators of the software consent to this arrangement.

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Professional codes of conduct

Promulgated by associations of professionals

Examples: AMA (American Medical Association), ABA (American Bar Association), AITP (Association of IT Professionals), ACM (Association of Computing Machinery)

Promises by professions to regulate themselves in the general interest of society

Real-world ethical dilemmas

One set of interests pitted against another

Example: right of company to maximize productivity of workers versus workers right to use Internet for short personal tasks

Principles to Guide Ethical Decisions

Other ethical dilemmas include companies trying to use new systems to reduce the size of their workforce, such as telephone companies using automated systems to reduce the need for human operators. Emphasize that in cases like these, right and wrong are not clearly defined, but instead, contrasting values are at odds with one another (companies value productivity, employees value their work).

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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)

Challenges to Privacy and Intellectual Property

Do students believe that there are sufficient protections for privacy in law? If not, what are possible methods of developing appropriate privacy protections? Table 4-3 in the text lists a variety of other laws affecting both the government and private institutions, but few areas of the private sector are as well regulated with respect to privacy. Do an in-class poll and ask students who among them feel they can control the use of their personal information on the Internet. You should get no one raising their hand.

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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

COPPA

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

HIPAA

Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011

Challenges to Privacy and Intellectual Property

Explain what is meant by a “mutuality of interest between record holder and individual.” (Briefly, the individual wants to engage in a transaction, and the record holder needs information about the individual to support the transaction—both are interested parties in the transaction.)

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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.

Challenges to Privacy and Intellectual Property

Do students believe that the Web sites they visit actually disclose their data collection and utilization practices? Is it difficult to find where?

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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.

Challenges to Privacy and Intellectual Property

These five Fair Information Practices provide the foundation for all privacy legislation in the United States, and much of Europe. You might go to a popular Web site, find its privacy policy, and see how well the site conforms to the principles above. Chances are good that the Web site you choose will have several statements in their policies which permit them to do anything they want with personal information. Also, do a search on “FTC privacy” and go to one of the reports listed. A search on “FTC behavioral targeting” also produces many fine reports on the topic.

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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.

U.S. businesses use safe harbor framework to work with EU personal data.

Stricter enforcements under consideration:

Right of access

Right to be forgotten

Challenges to Privacy and Intellectual Property

EU protections of privacy are far more powerful than the United States because they require informed consent before a firm can do anything with personal information besides support the transaction at hand. In Europe, there is no junk postal mail for instance because advertising firms are prohibited from using personal information obtained from third parties, and without the consent of the individual.

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Internet challenges to privacy:

Cookies

Identify browser and track visits to site

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

Challenges to Privacy and Intellectual Property

What are students attitudes toward these technologies? Emphasize that cookies can be useful at trusted sites, but perhaps invasive at others. Have students had any experience with spyware or Web bugs on their own computers? How would they know they are being tracked?

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