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 value-maximizing 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:– 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-to-

business 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

• 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.