CHAPTER 4 "Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems"

4.1 Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems

Although in the past business firms would often pay for the legal defense of their employees enmeshed in civil charges and criminal investigations, now firms are encouraged to cooperate with prosecutors to reduce charges against the entire firm for obstructing investigations. these developments mean that, more than ever, as a manager of an employee, you will have to decide for yourself what constitutes proper legal and ethical conduct.

Ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors. Information systems raise new ethical questions for both individuals and societies because they create opportunities for intense social change, and thus threaten existing distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations. Ethical issues in information systems have been given new urgency by the rise of the Internet and electronic commerce.

A Model For Thinking About Ethical, Social, and Political Issues

Ethical, social, and political issues are closely linked. 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.

Five Moral Dimensions of The Information Age

The major ethical, social, and political issues raised by information systems include the following moral dimensions:

• Information rights and obligations
• Property rights and obligations
• Accountability and control
• System quality
• Quality of life

Key Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issues

There are four key technological trends responsible for these ethical stresses.

• The doubling of computing power every 18 months has made it possible for most organizations to use information systems for their core production processes.
• Advances in data storage techniques and rapidly declining storage costs have been responsible for the multiplying databases on individuals-employees, customers, and potential customers-maintained by private and public organizations.
• Advances in data analysis techniques for large pools of data are another technological trend that heightens ethical concerns because companies and government agencies are able to find out highly detailed personal information about individuals.
• Advances in networking, including the Internet, promise to greatly reduce the costs of moving and accessing large quantities of data and open the possibility of mining large pools of data remotely using small desktop machines, permitting an invasion of privacy on a scale and with a precision heretofore unimaginable.

4.2 Ethics In An Information Society

Basic Concepts: Responsibility, Accountability, and Liability

Responsibility is a key element of ethical action. Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for the decisions you make. Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions: It means that mechanisms are in place to determine who took responsible action, and who is responsible. Liability extends the concept of responsibility further to the area of laws. Liability is a feature of political systems in which a body of laws is in place that permits individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations.

Ethical Analysis

When confronted with a situation that seems to present ethical issues, the following five-step process should help:

• Identify and describe clearly 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.

Candidate Ethical Principles

Although you are the only one who can decide which among many ethical principles you will follow, and how you will prioritize them, it is helpful to consider some ethical principles with deep roots in many cultures that have survived throughout recorded history:

• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (the Golden Rule).
• If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for everyone (Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative).
• If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all (Descartes' Rule of Change).
• Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value (Utilitarian Principle).
• Take the action that produces the least harm or the least potential cost (Risk Aversion Principle).
• Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone else unless there is a specific declaration otherwise (Ethical "No Free Lunch" Rule).

The appearance of unethical behavior may do as much harm to you and your company as actual unethical behavior.

Professional Codes of Conduct

When groups of people claim to be professionals, they take on special rights and obligations because of their special claims to knowledge, wisdom, and respect. Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by associations of professionals.

Some Real-World Ethical Dilemmas

Information systems have created new ethical dilemmas in which one set of interests is pitted against another. In each instance, you can find competing values at work, with groups lined up on either side of a debate. A close analysis of the facts can sometimes produce compromised solutions that give each side "half a loaf." Try to apply some of the principles of ethical analysis described to each of these cases.

4.3 The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems

We take a closer look at the five moral dimensions of information systems first we described above.

Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom In The Internet Age

Privacy is the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals or organizations, including the state. Privacy protections have also been added to recent laws deregulating financial services and safeguarding the maintenance and transmission of health information about individuals.

Internet Challenges to Privacy

Internet technology has posed new challenges for the protection of individual privacy. Web sites can learn the identities of their visitors if the visitors voluntarily register at the site to purchase a product or service or to obtain a free service, such as information. Web sites using cookie technology cannot directly obtain visitors' names and addresses. However, if a person has registered at a site, that information can be combined with cookie data to identify the visitor.

Technical Solutions

In addition to legislation, new technologies are available to protect user privacy during interactions with Web sites. There are now tools to help users determine the kind of personal data that can be extracted by Web sites.

Property Rights: Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is considered to be intangible property created by individuals or corporations. Intellectual property is subject to a variety of protections under three different legal traditions:

• Trade Secrets is any intellectual work product -a formula, device, pattern, or compilation of data- used for a business purpose.
• Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property from having their work copied by others for any purpose during the life of the author plus an additional 70 years after the author's death.
• Patents grant the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years.

Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights

Contemporary information technologies, especially software, pose severe challenges to existing intellectual property regimes and, therefore, create significant ethical, social, and political issues. The proliferation of electronic networks, including the Internet, has made it even more difficult to protect intellectual property. Using networks, information can be more widely reproduced and distributed.

Accountability, Liability, and Control

Along with privacy and property laws, new information technologies are challenging existing liability laws and social practices for holding individuals and institutions accountable.

Computer-Related Liability Problems

In general, insofar as computer software is part of a machine, and the machine injures someone physically or economically, the producer of the software and the operator can be held liable for damages. In general, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to hold software producers liable for their software products that are considered to be like books, regardless of the physical or economic harm that results.

System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors

Three principal sources of poor system performance are:

• software bugs and errors,
• hardware or facility failures caused by natural or other causes, and
• poor input data quality.

Although software bugs and facility catastrophes are likely to be widely reported in the press, by far the most common source of business system failure is data quality. Few companies routinely measure the quality of their data, but individual organizations report data error rates ranging from 0.5 to 30 percent.

Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries

Computers and information technologies potentially can destroy valuable elements of our culture and society even while they bring us benefits. Next, we briefly examine some of the negative social consequences of systems.

Balancing Power: Center Versus Periphery

The shift toward highly decentralized computing, coupled with an ideology of empowerment of thousands of workers, and the decentralization of decision making to lower organizational levels, have reduced the fears of power centralization in institutions. Lower-level employees may be empowered to make minor decisions, but the key policy decisions may be as centralized as in the past.

Rapidity of Change: Reduced Response Time to Competition

The now-more-efficient global marketplace has reduced the normal social buffers that permitted businesses many years to adjust to competition.

Maintaining Boundaries: Family, Work, and Leisure

The traditional boundaries that separate work from family and just plain leisure have been weakened. Weakening these institutions poses clear-cut risks. Family and friends historically have provided powerful support mechanisms for individuals, and they act as balance points in a society by preserving private life, providing a place for people to collect their thoughts, allowing people to think in ways contrary to their employer, and dream.

Dependence and Vulnerability

Today, our businesses, governments, schools, and private associations, such as churches, are incredibly dependent on information systems and are, therefore, highly vulnerable if these systems fail.

Computer Crime and Abuse

Computer crime is the commission of illegal acts through the use of a computer or against a computer system. Computers or computer systems can be the object of the crime, as well as the instrument of a crime. Computer abuse is the commission of acts involving a computer that may not be illegal but that are considered unethical. The popularity of the Internet and e-mail has turned one form of computer abuse-spamming-into a serious problem for both individuals and businesses.

Employment: Trickle-Down Technology and Reengineering Job Loss

Reengineering work is typically hailed in the information systems community as a major benefit of new information technology. Careful planning and sensitivity to employee needs can help companies redesign work to minimize job losses.

Equity and Access: Increasing Racial and Social Class Cleavages

The impact of systems technology on various groups in society has not been thoroughly studied. What is known is that information, knowledge, computers, and access to these resources through educational institutions and public libraries are inequitably distributed along ethnic and social class lines, as are many other information resources. Public interest groups want to narrow the digital divide by making digital information services-including the Internet-available to virtually everyone, just as basic telephone service is now.

Health Risks: RSI, CVS, and Technostress

• Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) occurs when muscle groups are forced through repetitive actions often with high-impact loads or tens of thousands of repetitions under low-impact loads.
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is the most common kind of computer-related RSI, in which pressure on the median nerve through the wrist's bony structure, called a carpal tunnel, produces pain.
• Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) refers to any eyestrain condition related to display screen use in desktop computers, laptops, e-readers, smartphones, and hand-held video games.
• The newest computer-related malady is technostress, which is stress induced by computer use. Its symptoms include aggravation, hostility toward humans, impatience, and fatigue.

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source: "Management Information System" e-book, 12th edition, written by Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Laudon.