Learning Objectives

Learning Objectives
• What ethical, social, and political issues are

raised by ?
• What specific principles for conduct can be
used to guide ethical decisions?
• Why do contemporary technology and the
Internet pose challenges to the protection of
individual privacy and intellectual property?
• How have affected everyday life?
Behavioral Targeting and Your Privacy: You’re the Target
• Problem: Need to efficiently target online ads

• Solutions: Behavioral targeting allows businesses
and organizations to more precisely target
desired demographics
• Google monitors user activity on thousands of
sites; businesses monitor own sites to understand
customers
• Demonstrates IT’s role in organizing and
distributing information
• Illustrates the ethical questions inherent in online
information gathering
Understanding Ethical and Social Issues
Related to Systems
• and ethics
– 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
• Model for thinking about ethical, social,

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
Systems
• THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN ETHICAL,
SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL
ISSUES IN AN
INFORMATION SOCIETY
Systems
• Five moral dimensions of the information

age
1. Information rights and obligations
2. Property rights and obligations
3. Accountability and control
4. System quality
5. Quality of life
Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems
• Key technology trends that raise ethical issues

1. Doubling of computer power
• More organizations depend on computer systems for
critical operations
2. Rapidly declining data storage costs
• Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on
individuals
3. Networking advances and the Internet
• Copying data from one location to another and
accessing personal data from remote locations is much
easier
Understanding Ethical and Social Issues Related to Systems
• Key technology trends that raise ethical issues

(cont.)
4. Advances in data analysis techniques
• Companies can analyze vast quantities of data gathered
on individuals for:
– Profiling
» Combining data from multiple sources to create dossiers
of detailed information on individuals
– Non obvious relationship awareness (NORA)
» Combining data from multiple sources to find obscure
hidden connections that might help identify criminals or
terrorists
NONOBVIOUS RELATIONSHIP AWARENESS (NORA)
NONOBVIOUS
RELATIONSHIP
AWARENESS (NORA)
NORA technology can take

,
information about people
from disparate sources and
find obscure, no obvious
relationships. It might
discover, for example, that an
applicant for a job at a gold
store shares a telephone
number with a known criminal
and issue an alert to the hiring
manager
Ethics in an Information Society
• 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
• Ethical analysis: A five-step process
1. Identify and clearly describe the facts
2. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the
higher-order values involved
3. Identify the stakeholders
4. Identify the options that you can reasonably take
5. Identify the potential consequences of your
options
• Professional codes of conduct
– Promulgated by associations of professionals
• E.g. IFLA, ARMA, AIIM, ACM
– Promises by professions to regulate themselves in
the general interest of society
• Real-world ethical dilemmas
– One set of interests pitted against another
– E.g. Right of company to maximize productivity of
workers vs. workers right to use Internet for short
personal tasks
The Moral Dimensions of
• 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

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Learning Objectives

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Learning Objectives

• What ethical, social, and political issues are

• Problem: Need to efficiently target online ads

• Model for thinking about ethical, social,

• Five moral dimensions of the information

• Key technology trends that raise ethical issues

• Key technology trends that raise ethical issues

NORA technology can take

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