Ethical, Legal and social issues
Concept of Ethics
Some definitions of ethics.
• A philosophy that considers what is right and what is wrong.
• Codes of morals of a particular profession.
• The standards of conduct of a given profession.
• Agreement among people to do the right and to avoid wrong.
• The discipline dealing with what is good and what is bad and with moral duty and obligation.
• It is the study of what is right to do in a given situation, and what we ought to do.
Some questions that are needed to be considered regarding issues.
• What information about an individual can be revealed to others?
• What information about individuals that should be kept in databases, and how secure is the information in the computer systems?
• How should one handle data piracy on computer networks.
• Who is allowed to access data and information?
• How can safeguards be introduced to ensure that the information can be accessed only by the right person or organizations?
Computers involve a special technology and they raise some special ethical issues. Computer ethics is the analysis of the nature and social impact of computer technology and the corresponding formulation and justification of policies for the ethical use of such technology. It concerns software as well as hardware and concerns networks connecting computers as well as computers themselves.
The Internet provides access to a variety of information on every topic and this information comes from many different countries throughout the world. One problem with the Internet is that all the information is freely available once a user is connected. There are areas of the Internet, which contain large amounts of illegal material. Material that is illegal in some countries may be perfectly legal in others.
Governments have the problem of finding a way of allowing users to gain access to the Internet but not to any illegal areas. If access to such material is restricted on one part of the Internet a user can simply move to another area to find a way to access the material.
There is a problem in restricting access. The Internet is a global system and it is difficult for single countries to make laws to control it. Another problem with restriction is that it could lead governments to begin attempts to censor, legislate and regulate the Internet for political, cultural and religious reasons. Civil liberty groups are naturally concerned about this aspect of control.
IT enables data exchange of information on a large scale from anybody, on any locations or part of the world, at any time. In this situation, there is increased potential for disclosing information and violating the privacy of any individuals and groups of people due to its widespread dissemination worldwide.
It is a challenge and our responsibility to maintain the privacy and integrity of data regarding individuals. This also includes taking precautions to ensure the accuracy of data, as well as protecting it from unauthorized access or accidental disclosure to inappropriate individuals.
Information Technology has problematic implications and some negative impacts on our society. It poses and creates some problems related to ethics, and contains in general three main types of ethical issues:
• Personal privacy
• Access right
• Harmful actions.
Let us look more closely at these issues, exploring in each case the ways in which they affect public reactions to this technological change.
Personal Privacy
Access right
Due to the current popularity of international commerce on the Internet, the topic of computer security and access right has moved quickly from being a low priority for corporations and government agencies to a high priority. Many attempts of such illegal access by computer hackers have been widely reported. Without implementation of proper computer security policies and strategies, network connections on the Internet can’t be made secure from illegal accesses.
Harmful action
In computer ethics, harmful action means injury or negative consequences, such as undesirable loss of information
The rapid explosion in the use of computers in the last 15 years has benefited us in many ways. Many things that we now take for granted, such as the use of credit cards and cash dispensers would have been impossible without them. However, there are problems. As more computers are used, more and more information about each of us is stored on computers. By linking the information gained from several computers together it is possible to build up a complete picture of a person's life.
Software theft
As more and more information is held there is the chance of some of it being incorrect. Your private life is becoming less and less private.
It could be said that the use of personal computers has turned many users into thieves. How many people could honestly say that all the software on their hard disks has been purchased by them? As you can see from the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1989, it is a criminal offence to copy or steal software.
Hacking
Hacking means gaining illegal access to someone else’s computer system. Many people see this type of thing as a challenge and not as an illegal activity.
• Loss of property
• Property damage
• Unwanted environmental impacts
This principle prohibits use of computing technology in ways that result in harm to any of users, the general public, employees and employers. Harmful actions include intentional destruction or modification of files and programs leading to serious loss of resources or unnecessary expenditure of human resources such as the time and effort required to purge systems from “Computer Viruses”.
So far there has been relatively little investigation into the privacy and security issues relevant to these ethical problems in IT and Cyberspace. Beside the false contents of information on Internet, many people try to access information that they don’t have rights to. For this reason, computer developers have proposed and used intrusion-detection systems as the basis of security systems designed to protect privacy. Typically, the intrusion detection systems determine if a user is an intruder or a legitimate user, generally by way of various internal system profiles.
Encryption technology to minimize harmful actions on internet
On the Internet, scrambled messages are quite popular as we protect our credit card numbers and private information from enemy hackers. A mathematical technique, called encryption, is used to scramble/encode a message into an unreadable format. The message’s recipient decrypts, or decodes, the data using a key that converts it back into a readable form.
The data can be encrypted in a number of forms: web information transmissions, e-mail, files, transactions, etc.
Such encryption is widely used in
• Online banking transactions
• Internet shopping
• In point-of-sale machines
• Stock trading
• In ATMs
• In electronic business to business transactions
Digital ID
Another form of data protection that is specific for e-mail messages is called “Digital ID”. As more people send confidential information by e-mail, it is increasingly important to be sure that documents sent on e-mail are not forged, and to be certain that messages sent cannot be intercepted and read by anyone other that the intended recipient.
Firewalls
Another protection method against computer crimes is called Firewalls. Internet firewall is essentially one or more systems that control access between computer networks. The firewall serves two basic purposes:
• It controls access to the network from outside users
• It also controls the transfer of information from the inside network to the outside world (Internet).
The most important thing to remember about firewall is that it creates an access control policy for the organization.
In this regard, ethical problems are very important to be understood, realized, and solved legally or technically, not only in one or two countries, but also worldwide.
