Ethical and social issues in Information system

Securing information system

Security: Policies, procedures and technical measures used to prevent unauthorized access,
alterations, theft or physical damages to information system.

Control: Methods, policies and organizational procedures that ensure safety of

organization’s assets, accuracy and reliability of its accounting records and operational
excellence to management standard

Why systems are vulnerable

When a large amount of data is stored in electronic form, they are vulnerable to many more
kinds of threat than they existed in manual form. Through communication network, IS in
different location are interconnected where the potential for unauthorized access abuse or
fraud is not limited to a single location. But can occur at any access point in the network.

Ethics in IS
Ethics
Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make
choices to guide their behaviors

IS rise new ethical question for both individual and societies because they create
opportunity for intense social change and thus menace existing scattering of power, money,
right and obligation.

Information systems and ethics

Information systems 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

Ethics in information society

They are easily managed in small groups because the group itself tends to keep the
individual’s behavior under control. The larger the group, the harder it is to manage the
actions of individuals. Now they exist in a huge number of people with many frames of
reference and experiences. Responsibility to the group becomes tough to police and
accountability for an individual’s actions is harder to enforce.

Every action causes a reaction

Basic elementary terms on information society are:

Responsibility – accepting potential costs, duties and responsibilities for your decisions.
 Accountability – determining who should take responsibility for conclusions and actions.
Mechanisms for identifying responsible parties

Liability – legally setting responsibility with a person or group. Permits individuals (and
firms) to recover damages done to them

Due process – ensuring the laws is applied fairly and correctly

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

The relationship between ethical, social, and political issues in an information society

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. These issues have five moral dimensions: information rights and obligations,
property rights and obligations, system quality, quality of life, and accountability and
control

Rights and obligations of information:

What are regarded as the rights of individuals and corporations for information about
themselves? What are the legal means to safeguard it? And what are supposed to be the
obligations are for that information. These rights include
-Privacy is regarded as the right of individuals to stay in peace.
-Technology and information systems menace the privacy of individuals in order to make
low-cost, efficient and effective takeover.
 Due process requires the existence of a set of rules or regulations that properly define how
we serve information about individuals and that call mechanisms available.

Information rights: privacy and freedom in the Internet age

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

Property rights:

How to modify the traditional theories of patent rights and intellectual property rights in
the digital technology? What are these rights and how to safeguard? Information
technology has obstructed the protection of property because it is very simple to copy
computer information networks. Intellectual property is subject to many protections within
three patents

Property rights: Intellectual property

Intellectual property: intangible property of any kind created by individuals or corporations

Three main ways that intellectual property is protected:

• Trade secret: intellectual work or product belonging to business, not in the

public domain

• Copyright: statutory grant protecting intellectual property from being copied

for the life of the author, plus 70 years

• Patents: grants creator of invention an exclusive monopoly on ideas behind

invention for 20 years

Challenges to intellectual property rights

Digital media different from physical media (e.g., books)
• Ease of replication
• Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)
• Difficulty in classifying software
• Compactness
• Difficulties in establishing uniqueness

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based protections of copyrighted materials
 Responsibility and control
 Who is responsible and who controls the use and abuse of information from the people.
The new information technologies are challenging existing laws regarding liability and
social practices, to force individuals and institutions accountable for their actions.
 The mechanism for assessing responsibilities for decisions made and action taken is
accountability. The accountability is responsible for property rights, system quality and
quality of life and control of system

System quality
 What are the data standards, that the information processing programs should be required
to make sure the safeguard of individual rights and society? It can grasp individuals and
organizations for avoidable and foreseeable outcomes if their obligation is to see and
correct.
 All developers want to maintain system quality and data accuracy. All the vendors should
have the rights to select the quality system for their use. A system which is error-free,
affordable and maintainable is the best system. In some cases, the working system should
have the quality for privacy and safety so that this will not create organizational
indiscipline

System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors

What is an acceptable, technologically feasible level of system quality?

• Flawless software is economically unfeasible

Three principal sources of poor system performance:

• Software bugs, errors

• Hardware or facility failures

• Poor input data quality (most common source of business system failure)

Accountability, liability, control

Computer-related liability problems

If software fails, who is responsible?
 If seen as part of machine that injures or harms, software producer and operator may be
liable.
 If seen as similar to book, difficult to hold author/publisher responsible.
 What should liability be if software seen as service? Would this be similar to telephone
systems not being liable for transmitted messages?
 Quality of life: Equity, access, boundaries

Negative social consequences of systems

• Balancing power: although computing power decentralizing, key decision

making remains centralized

• Rapidity of change: businesses may not have enough time to respond to global
competition

• Maintaining boundaries: computing, Internet use lengthens work-day,

infringes on family, personal time

• Dependence and vulnerability: public and private organizations ever more

dependent on computer systems

The quality of the system will maintain the quality of life. All information has their norms and
values, which will play the vital role in the quality of life. This will help to give answer for the
different questions like what values should be preserved and protected in a society depended on
information and knowledge?

What are the institutions that should protect and what are the institutions that are to be protected?
The negative social costs of inaugurating information technologies and systems are expanding
along with the power of technology. Computers and information technologies can destruct
valuable elements of culture and society while providing perks.

Key technology trends that raise ethical issues

 Doubling of computer power

More organizations depend on computer systems for critical operations
 Rapidly declining data storage costs
Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals
 Networking advances and the Internet
Copying data from one location to another and accessing personal data from remote
locations is much easier

 Advances in data analysis techniques

Companies can analyze vast quantities of data gathered on individuals for: