New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
Computer and Information Science Department (CIS)
CIS677:
Information System Principles
Professor: Michael
Bieber
Please treat the video taped lectures as you would any in-classroom lectures. Take notes! Taking notes will force you to pay deeper attention to the discussion and important materials. Plus it will give you information to study from and perhaps incorporate into your midterm and article reviews.
The lecture notes that we are providing are not substitutes for you taking notes, rather a time saver that provides you an outline of the lecture. We leave a lot of gaps, which leaves you room to write your own notes on top of it.
Guest: Roxanne Hiltz, Distinguished Professor, CIS Department - NJIT (roxanne@vc.njit.edu; http://eies.njit.edu/~hiltz)
Examples of issues concerning Human, Ethical and Societal Issues of IS:
- Privacy: IRS employees illegally browsing through tax returns of neighbors, friends, etc.
- Law enforcement databases often contain erroneous data
- Large computerized databases track personal information about everyone and their purchases, which they can sell.
- Access: to physically challenged people
{Also see the W3C
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines included with the
lecture handouts.}
- Copyright: If you want to earn a living from writing software, should I be able to copy it for free?
- Responsibility of software developers to meet the client's expectations
- Human-Centered Design: the technology/business processes are designed to make people's work as effective and satisfying as possible.
- Machine-Centered Design: the technology/business processes are designed to make the technology most efficient and to earn the maximum revenue.
* deskilling
* surveillance
Example of a software developer who works for a consulting company. Assume that the software built clearly meets all the requirements, but is inadequate.
*** Zwass'98 Figure 17.1 handout here ***
Ethics: Study of standards of conduct and moral
judgment
Moral Judgment: capability of distinguishing between right
(beneficial) and wrong (harmful)
3 General Ethical Principles (for judging whether something is right or wrong)
* cultural/ethical relativism
* consequentialism/utilitarianism:
Weigh the options and choose the alternative with the greater good
collectively.
* deontological theory:
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you"
The ACM has a code of ethics for dealing with this example, and
many other issues.
*** ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct handout here ***
Note that the IEEE and ACM since have agreed upon a unified code of ethics as of last year. See: http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm, as well as Don Gotterbarn, Keith Miller and Simon Rogerson, "Software engineering code of ethics is approved,"Communications of the ACM 42, 10 (Oct. 1999), Pages 102 - 107.
A. General Moral Imperatives: {from ACM Code of Ethics}
+ 1.1 Contribute to society and human well-being.
"... An essential aim of computing professionals is
to minimize negative consequences of computing systems... When
designing or implementing systems, computing professionals must
attempt to ensure that the products of their efforts will be used in
socially responsible ways, will meet social needs, and will avoid
harmful effects to health and welfare..."
+ 1.2 Avoid harm to others.
"... carefully consider potential impacts on all
those affected by decisions made during design and implementation...
To minimize the possibility of indirectly harming others, computing
professionals must minimize malfunctions by following generally
accepted standards for system design and testing..."
Bob S. asks:
What happens if your job is actually to put harm on others? Such as in the military. Like if you have to design programs to handle weapon control.
Mark C asks:
I am in the military. What about military development? Actually there is a new thought. It's actually a very old thought. It comes from Sung Shu, a Chinese strategist about 500 B.C. I don't know what the date is. And basically it deals with a really propound question is being wrestled with in Washington DC right now The military right now is considering doing less harm in several ways to any advisary. Number one is with non-lethal weapons, for example, a glue gun that shoots glue or a gun that shoots a net that just captures the enemy without harm. There is also kind of concept that if you can actually defeat the enemy's will to fight before you even engage in combat there will be less loss of life on both sides.
{+ 1.3, 1.4 - These are some of the categories from the ACM Code of Ethics that we are skipping. See the full set on the ACM's Web site for details.}
+ 1.5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patents
"... Copies of software should be made only with
proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not
be condoned."
Bob S. notes regarding copyright:
Could they just get copyright for the interface only or the actual algorithm and there is no way you can copyright the formula 2 plus 2 equals four. It's harder to do copyright for software. It's hard to copyright formulas. Lotus, for example they just change the interface.
A note on music: This shows how fast things are changing since we taped this in Spring '99. Now, of course, music can be copied on-line from the Web or by copying CD-ROMs...
+ 1.7 Respect the privacy of others
"Computing and communication technology enables the
collection and exchange of personal information on a scale
unprecedented in the history of civilization... Professionals must
maintain the privacy and integrity of data describing individuals.
This includes taking precautions to ensure the accuracy of data, as
well as protecting it from unauthorized access or accidental
disclosure... Furthermore, procedures must be established to allow
individuals to review their records and correct inaccuracies... Only
the necessary amount of personal information should be collected in a
system. Professions should clearly define and reinforce retention
and disposal periods; Personal information gathered for a specific
purpose not be used for other purposes without consent of the
individual(s)..."
Marium M. notes regarding inaccuracy of legal records:
Not only that but just to make a comment. They had on one of the late-night news just in the past week about a story about a woman who got something in the mail and it was a criminal charge against her for abandoning a child that she never had. Because there was some kind of confusion between her and someone else on the records. It got transferred to her and she had to go through whole legal battle just to prove that there was some kind of mistake somewhere along the line in some MIS systems.
* data shadow
Mark S states regarding privacy:
I will not be surprised within next five or ten years that you see a Supreme Court case on privacy and someone could claim a way to say I lost my privacy electronically, which amounts to illegal "search and seizure..."
Marium M. then asks:
Is there something being done to incorporate these ethical issues to put them in legal issues? I mean these are separate legal and ethical issues but we have no laws to protect these against these ethical issues but in the future this is becoming a big part of life.
Angel G. asks:
My question is when these ethics are violated who is ... going to do something about it?
Regarding that IS professionals don't need a licence, Mark S. notes:
So you are saying is that Information System professions have potential to be less ethical than lawyers
And Bob S. notes:
So graduating from college is enough to practice what we are studying?
Bob S. continues:
If it changes so fast, would you require re-licensing every year?
B. More Specific Professional Responsibilities:
+ 2.7 Improve public understanding of computing and its
consequences
"Computing professionals have a responsibility to
share technical knowledge with the public by encouraging
understanding of computing, including the impacts of computer systems
and their limitations. This imperative implies an obligation to
counter any false views related to computing."
C. Organizational Leadership Imperatives:
"anthropomorphize" means giving something human characteristics, such as people do to animals in cartoons. We in the computer field tend to do this a lot with computers.
This page: http://www.cis.njit.edu/~bieber/CIS677/lecture-notes/lecture4.html