This document discusses several ethical issues related to information and communication technology (ICT). It addresses definitions of cyber ethics, issues like privacy, spoofing, piracy, and spamming in e-commerce. It also covers patient privacy in healthcare. The document outlines different approaches to ethics like deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. It discusses the British Computer Society Code of Conduct and how ethics applies to ICT professionals, business, cloud computing, hacking, and online privacy in the age of social media and information sharing.

2. Overview
• Ethical issues for ICT professionals
• Definitions and basic concepts
• Western moral tradition and evolution
• What is the relevance of ethics to ICTs?
• Cyber-ethics issues and dilemmas
• Practical approaches to applying ethics

3. The Ethical Issues In E-Commerce
Web Spoofing. Web spoofing is an electronic deception relates to the
Internet. ...
Cyber-Squatting. ...
Privacy Invasion. ...
Online Piracy. ...
Email Spamming.
Patient Privacy and Confidentiality. The protection of private patient
information is one of the most important ethical and legal issues in the field
of healthcare. ...
Transmission of Diseases. ...
Relationships. ...
End-of-Life Issues.
What are ethical issues in ecommerce?

4. 4
Why ‘Cyber-ethics’?
• Computer ethics
– Customised or bespoke software (machines)
• Internet ethics
– Netiquette (www, email) (content)
• Cyber-ethics
– LAN  Internet  Cloud (environment)

5. Ethical issues for ICT professionals
• Data protection and other legal matters
• Hacktivism
• Business computer ethics
• Surveillance at work
• Ethics in the Cloud
• Online privacy
5

6. British Computer Society Code of Conduct
• Public interest
– Awareness of legal environment
– Avoid discrimination
• Duty to relevant authority
– Compliance and expert judgement
– Confidentiality and disclosure
– Manage task within time and budget
• Duty to the profession
• Professional competence and integrity
6

7. 7
Systems of ethics:
From ancient Greece to the 21st Century
• Deontology: rules, rights and duties
– Divine command ethics
– Kantian ethics
• Contractualism
– Hobbes
– Social contract
• Consequentialism
– Utilitarianism
• Virtue ethics

8. 8
Virtue ethics
• Aristotle and purpose in life
– Excellence, flourishing as source of happiness
• Augustine, Aquinas
– Specification of virtue in terms of health,
aesthetics, knowledge, authenticity, integrity,
justice, friendship, holiness

9. 9
Computer ethics
• Postwar period:
• the rise of ‘artificial intelligence’ and fears of social domination
by computers
• large-scale computation enabling greater lethality of military
weaponry
• large-scale data manipulation enabling the centralisation of
social control (especially government): privacy and dignity
• Microcomputers, networking and personal computers
• software and IPRs
• hacking
• Internet and bandwidth
• privacy and protection from malicious individuals
• dependency in the age of informational capitalism
• Cloud computing

10. 10
Conceptualising computers and ethics
 Software
 Hacking
 the Internet
 the Cloud
“Computer and information technology creates new
possibilities; it instruments human action in new
ways. The ethical issues that are thereby created are
not out of the realm of human under-standing, but
they have unique features with which we must come
to grips.” (Johnson)

11. 11
Business computer ethics
• Ethical behaviour as essential to maintaining trust that is
the basis for doing business:
– clients, customers and suppliers
– competitors, especially when collaborating
– employees, shareholders and stakeholders
empirical observation: “ethical behaviour works” (Langford)
• Computers pervasive in all aspects of business, and
businesses of all sizes are highly dependent upon them
• Computers allow very complex processes to take place
which are not transparent to consumers or regulators

12. 12
What does secrecy mean in a
virtual social environment?
• Privacy
• Anonymity
• Identity
• Security
• Confidentiality

13. 13
Privacy
Theories of privacy:
– Non-intrusion privacy: being free from
interruption and interference
– Seclusion privacy: personal privacy and
being alone
– Control/access privacy: having control over
information about oneself
– Limitation privacy: context-dependent
limits to access to one’s personal
information

14. 14
Internet privacy
• Datagathering and cyberstalking
• Dataveillance
• Merging electronic records
• Personal data mining
• Search engines
• Social networking online
What is properly personal and private, and
what is in the public domain?

15. 15
Identity in the virtual world
• Personal, social and legal identity
• Aliases
• Constructed identities
• Digital effigies