LM13 – Computer Ethics

Nature of Information

We discuss ethics and Digital Rights Management (DRM) throughout this course but as a basis, we should recognize the difference between digital and physical items.

There is a fundamental difference between Physical entities and Information*.

Physical items:

          • Wear out
          • Are replicated at the expense of the manufacturer
          • Exist at a tangible location
          • When sold, the seller no longer owns the thing

Information in contrast:

          • Never wears out, (though it can become obsolete or untrue)
          • Can be replicated at virtually no cost without limit
          • Exists in the ether
          • When sold, the seller still retains the information, (This ownership provides little value if the ability of others to copy it is not limited)
          • Often costly to produce, but cheap to reproduce, therefore pricing is set to recover the sunk cost of its initial production and is typically based on the value to the consumer.
Comparison of the economics of things with the economics of information. Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster, Blown to Bits (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

*This has held true until the advent/emergence of 3D printing especially when we consider 3D scanning and the ability to scan a 3D object and reproduce it. – Prof Looby

Ethics contexts 

1st, please read the www.ciss100.com => Discussion Board => Ethics DB to understand the distinction between Stockholder, Stakeholder, and Social Contract ethical theories and the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Ethics are highly contextual depending on the situation (e.g. developed and assessed from a stockholder, stakeholder or social-contract perspective). Many companies and individuals will qualify their practices in terms of fiscal stability. To this extent please review stockholder, stakeholder, and social-contract theory here as you will need to reference one of these to establish a conceptual basis for your Ethics Discussion Board posting:  http://www.ciss100.com/lecture-topics-modules/business-it-addendum/

Ethical Information Elements

Privacy

          • What information must you reveal about yourself to others?
          • What information should others be able to access about you – with or without your permission?
          • What safeguards exist for your protection?

Accuracy

          • Who is responsible for the reliability and accuracy of information?
          • Who will be accountable for errors?

Property

          • Who owns the information?
          • Who owns the channels of distribution, and how should they be regulated?

Accessibility

          • What information does a person or an organization have a right to obtain, under what conditions, and with what safeguards?

Now its not just what information an organization has about us but what can they extrapolate and apply from the information.  Target’s use of predictive analysis as presented in the Colbert Report and various privacy policies (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc.). Further, consider this was 2012 and that Big Data/available information, AI/machine learning/predictive analytics, and computational processing power have evolved at a staggering rate since 2012 so who knows how much they know or can deduce about us.

Colbert’s Surrender to a Buyer Power

Now let’s consider the 2020 October US Senate hearing revealed Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter share an internal application that allows them to track users browsing the Web and share this user information across their 3 platforms and then both censor and lead users to the information they want them to see.

Lecture Recordings:

Emergent Tech & Ethics DB Intro

Chapter 13 Presentation

 

 

Ethics & Digital Environment

Applied/Ethical Hacking

The Kali Linux Final Project is a great example of applied or white hat hacking and is recommended for System and Network Administrators.  Here is a nice perspective on the positive value of and need for applied hacking.

Firesheep and Blacksheep:

As another example of ethical hacking, Firesheep was introduced by a security advocate who was tired of Facebook’s low security (non-encrypted).  Of course, there is a cost to Facebook as implementing SSL is expensive and we will soon speak about ethics and specifically stock-holder, stakeholder, and social contract theory.  Personally, I feel/felt that Facebook should minimally be in accord with stakeholder theory and protect their users.   While I am digressing, please recall SSL is a TCP/IP application layer protocol so the information is encrypted at the top of the TCP/IP stack.    In any event, Facebook took a long time following the introduction of Firesheep to beef up its security as if they didn’t even care about their users.

codebutler.com/firesheep

http://research.zscaler.com/2010/11/blacksheep-tool-to-detect-firesheep.html

Predictive Policing

Now here is an emerging use of analytics and as the TedTalk on Privacy illuminated, how far away are we from the Science Fiction of Minority Report?

Ethics Resources