This document contains review questions about ethical, social, and political issues related to technology. It discusses how ethics, society, and politics are interconnected and provides examples. Key technology trends like increasing computer power and data storage capabilities are highlighted as heightening ethical concerns due to their impact on privacy, data analysis, and system dependence. The document also defines responsibility, accountability, and liability and outlines the five steps of an ethical analysis. It identifies six ethical principles and discusses professional codes of conduct, privacy, and how technology challenges privacy protection. Intellectual property rights and challenges posed by the Internet are also addressed.

1. Review Questions
1. In what ways are ethical, social, and political issues connected? Give some examples.
Ethics refers to principles of right and wrong which individuals use to guide their
behavior. Individuals act within a social environment that, in turn, exists within a
political environment. Ethical dilemmas are problems that affect society and that often
are addressed in the political arena. For example, new computer technology makes it
easier to gain private information about individuals, creating an ethical dilemma for the
potential user of that information (whether or not to invade the privacy of the
individual). Society will respond by demanding new laws to regulate the use of data.
Students will be able to give a range of examples of this connection.
2. What are the key technology trends that heighten ethical concerns?
Table 5-1 identifies the four key technology trends. These trends include computer
power doubling every 18 months, rapid decline in data storage costs, data analysis
advances, and networking advances and the Internet.
The doubling of computing power every 18 months is creating a growing dependence
on systems and a consequent vulnerability to system errors, poor data quality, and
failure of critical systems. Advances in data storage techniques and rapidly declining
storage costs provide for massive data storage capabilities on individual systems and
enable the routine violation of individual privacy. Advances in datamining techniques
for large databases allow those who are able to dominate supercomputing capacity
(large businesses and governments) to increase their power over individuals through the
analysis of massive amounts of data about individuals. Advances in telecommunications
infrastructure allow the movement of massive amounts of data at greatly reduced cost,
permitting the use of data and, as a result, the invasion of privacy on a scale and
precision unimaginable to us now.
3. What are the differences between responsibility, accountability, and liability?
Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for the
decisions you make. Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions that
allows the determination of who is responsible. Liability is a feature of political systems
that permits individuals to recover damages done to them by responsible individuals or
organizations.
4. What are the five steps in an ethical analysis?
The five steps in an ethical analysis are outlined in the Manager's Toolkit. The five
steps include (1) identify and describe clearly the facts; (2) define the conflict or
dilemma and identify the higher order values involved; (3) identify the stakeholders; (4)
identify the options you can reasonably take, and (5) identify the potential consequences
of your options.
5. Identify and describe six ethical principles.

2. The six ethical principles include the golden rule, Immanuel Kant's Categorical
Imperative, Descartes' rule of change, Utilitarian Principle, Risk Aversion Principle, and
ethical "no free lunch" rule. The golden rule suggests doing unto others as you would
have them do unto you. Kant's Categorical Imperative suggests that if an action is not
right for everyone to take, then it is not right for anyone. Descartes' rule of change, also
known as the slippery slope rule, suggests that if an action cannot be taken repeatedly,
then it is not right to be taken at any time. The Utilitarian Principle suggests taking the
action that achieves the higher or greater value. The Risk Aversion Principle suggests
taking the action that produces the least harm or the least potential cost. The ethical "no
free lunch" rule says that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by
someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise.
6. What is a professional code of conduct?
When groups of people claim to be professionals, they take on special rights and
obligations. As professionals, they enter into even more constraining relationships with
employers, customers, and society because of the special claims to knowledge, wisdom,
and respect. Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by associations of
professionals in order to regulate entrance qualifications and competencies and to
establish codes of ethics.
7. What are meant by "privacy" and "fair information practices”?
Privacy is the claim that individuals have the right to be left alone, free from
surveillance or interference from other individuals or organizations, including the state.
Claims to privacy involve the workplace as well as the home. Information technology
threatens individual claims to privacy by making the invasion of privacy cheap,
profitable, and effective.
The fair information practices (FIP) is a set of principles governing the collection and
use of information about individuals. The five FIP principles are: (1) notice/awareness;
(2) choice/consent; (3) access/participation; (4) security; and (5) enforcement.
8. How is the Internet challenging the protection of individual privacy?
Cookies, Web bugs, and other means of collecting information about Internet users can
be shared without the Internet user's consent. This allows information that a user may
have given voluntarily for a good purpose, say logging into the New York Times site, to
be shared with some other site. Spamming or e-mail that uses a user’s e-mail address is
another invasion of privacy.
9. What role can informed consent, legislation, industry self-regulation, and technology
tools play in protecting individual privacy of Internet users?
Informed consent means that the Web site visitor knowingly permits the collection of
data about his/her and his/her visit to the company's Web site. Federal privacy laws help
regulate the collection, usage, and disclosure of information in the United States. Table
5-2 lists several of the federal privacy laws in the United States. Businesses have taken

3. some steps, including publishing statements about how their information will be used
and sometimes offering an opt-out right. However, few businesses offer an opt-in
approach. Several technology tools are available to combat privacy invasion. Technical
solutions enable e-mail encryption, anonymous e-mailing and surfing, and cookie
rejection. Table 5-4 lists several privacy tools. Of particular interest is the P3P standard
that allows the user to have more control over personal information that is gathered on
the Web sites that she visits.
10. What are the three different regimes that protect intellectual property rights? What
challenges to intellectual property rights are posed by the Internet?
Three different legal traditions that protect property rights are trade secret, copyright,
and patent. A trade secret is any intellectual work product used for a business purpose
that can be classified as belonging to that business, provided it is not based on
information in the public domain. The drawback to trade secret protection is that once
an idea falls into the public domain, it no longer can be protected as a trade secret. A
copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property against
copying by others for any purpose for a period of 28 years. (For work created on or after
January 1, 1978, the intellectual property is protected during the author's lifetime plus
70 years after his death.) The drawback of this protection is that underlying ideas are
not protected, only their manifestations in a work. A patent grants the owner a
monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years. While patent protection does
grant a monopoly on the underlying concepts and ideas, the difficulty is passing
stringent criteria of non-obviousness, originality, and novelty. The Internet makes it
very easy to widely distribute and reproduce intellectual property.
11. Why is it so difficult to hold software services liable for failure or injury?
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to hold software producers liable for their software
products because it is only when software acts as a part of a defective product that strict
liability pertains. If the software is strictly a service (not part of a product), these laws
do not apply. As part of a product, software is still considered to be like books, which
historically are protected from liability claims by the First Amendment guaranteeing
freedom of expression.
12. What is the most common cause of system quality problems?
The three principal sources of system quality problems are hardware and facility
failures, software bugs and errors, and data quality. However, the most common cause
of system quality problems is data quality. According to the 1998 Redman study cited
in the textbook, individual organizations report data error rates ranging from 0.5 to 30
percent.
13. Name and describe four "quality of life" impacts of computers and information
systems.
The textbook describes eight "quality of life" impacts of computers and information
systems. These include balancing power, rapidity of change, maintaining boundaries,

4. dependency and vulnerability, computer crime and abuse, employment, equity and
access, and health risks.
Balancing power describes the shift toward highly decentralized computing, coupled
with an ideology of "empowerment" of thousands of workers and decentralization of
decision making to lower organizational levels. The problem is that the lower-level
worker involvement in decision making tends to be trivial. Key policy decisions are as
centralized as in the past.
The rapidity of change impact suggests that information systems have increased the
efficiency of the global marketplace. As a result, businesses no longer have many years
to adjust to competition. Businesses can now be wiped out very rapidly, and along with
them, jobs.
The maintaining boundaries impact suggests that portable computers and
telecommuting have created the condition where people can take their work anywhere
with them and do it at any time. As a result, workers find that their work is cutting into
family time, vacations, and leisure, weakening the traditional institutions of family and
friends and blurring the line between public and private life.
The dependency and vulnerability impact suggests that businesses, governments,
schools, and private associations are becoming more and more dependent on
information systems, and so they are highly vulnerable to the failure of those systems.
The computer crime and abuse impact suggests that computers have created new
opportunities for committing crimes and have themselves become the target of crimes.
The employment impact suggests that redesigning business processes could potentially
cause millions of middle-level managers and clerical workers to lose their jobs. Worse,
if reengineering actually works as claimed, these workers will not find similar
employment because the demand for their skills will decline.
The equity and access impact suggests that access to computer and information
resources is not equitably distributed throughout society. Access is distributed
inequitably along racial, economic, and social class lines (as are many other information
resources). Poor children attending poor school districts are less likely to use computers
at school. Children from wealthy homes are five times more likely to use PCs for
schoolwork than poor children. Whites are three times more likely to use computers at
home for schoolwork than African-Americans. Potentially, we could create a society of
information haves and have-nots, further increasing the social cleavages in our society.
Health risks have been attributed to computers and information technologies. For
instance, business now spends $20 billion a year to compensate and treat victims of
computer-related occupational diseases. Those illnesses include RSI (repetitive stress
injury), CVS (computer vision syndrome), and technostress.
14. What is technostress, and how would you identify it?

5. Technostress is defined as stress induced by computer-use. Its symptoms are
aggravation, hostility towards humans, impatience, and enervation.
15. Name three management actions that could reduce RSI.
Management can reduce RSI (repetitive stress injury) by using workstations (mainly
keyboards) designed for a neutral wrist position (using a wrist rest to support the wrist).
Use of proper monitor stands and footrests will contribute to proper posture and so
reduce RSI, as will allowing (or requiring) employees to take frequent breaks from their
work to walk around. Finally, use of new, ergonomically designed keyboards will also
help.
Case Study – The FBI and Digital Surveillance: How Far Should It Go? 1. Does
Carnivore present an ethical dilemma? Explain your answer. Students can answer this
question in many ways. Key to their responses, however, is that they respond by using
an ethical approach. What is the correct moral choice? The other element students must
deal with is who is making the choice? Does the FBI staff responsible for using it have
an ethical choice? What about those who are responsible for the decisions of the ISP, do
they have an ethical dilemma? Or do some of them want to deal with the possibility of
the congresspersons that have to make decisions about it? Or even the writers who write
about ethical and social issues in a digital firm? The best way for students to analyze
this issue is to apply the five-step ethical analysis approach to this situation. Your
students also need to examine the candidates for ethical principles. This question should
lead to an interesting discussion, partly because the dilemma is very real, particularly in
this post-September 11 period. 2. Apply an ethical analysis to the issue of the FBI’s use
of information technology and U.S. citizens’ privacy rights. Notice that this question is
broader than the first question because this asks about the use of information technology
whereas Question 1 limits the issue to Carnivore. No matter where individual students
stand on the issue of Carnivore, it is difficult to come to a clear stance on the broader
issue of information technology. However, the question is limited to the uses by the
FBI. Begin the discussion by asking the students about the different ways the FBI uses
information technology. For each use, have your students determine whether or not it
can affect the privacy rights of citizens. For example, the FBI can use information
technology for storing the DNA of individuals. Is this a problem for citizens’ privacy
rights? 3. What are the ethical, social and political issues raised by the FBI tapping the
e-mails of individuals and collecting personal data on them?
As with most ethical issues, student views will vary widely. Your task is to make sure
the differing views are raised and discussed because these issues are complex and affect
the future and type of government we live under, whichever country we live in. And,
again in the case of Carnivore, does it fall under these issues given the fact that the FBI
wants control of the information technology that can be misused? Are there alternative
ways of accomplishing the goals? This can be a very lively, engaging and thought-
provoking discussion.
The ethical privacy issue examines the conditions under which someone should invade
the privacy of others; what legitimates intruding into others’ lives through unobtrusive

6. surveillance or other means; do we have to inform people that we are eavesdropping;
and do we have to inform people that we are using credit history information for
employment screening purposes? These are critical issues, but these are directed at
more standard telephone tapping, and Carnivore has another issue — the use of
Carnivore to obtain information not covered by the court order, whether it is about other
people or about the person covered by the court order.
As the text says, the social issue of privacy concerns the development of “expectations
of privacy” or privacy norms and public attitudes. Do we (the society) encourage people
to expect “private territory” when using modern technology, including e-mail? Should
expectations of privacy be extended to criminal conspirators, and if not, how do we
know if they are criminal conspirators, and if so how do we solve crimes?
The political area really covers the issue of lawmaking. Should the FBI be allowed to
eavesdrop on e-mails of criminal suspects? If so, how do we prevent the FBI from
misusing that power?
4.How effective is Carnivore as a terrorism and crime-prevention tool?
The answers should be relatively clear. Those who are amateurs at electronic
communication can probably be caught if they use e-mail for criminal (including
terrorist) reasons. However the case study shows that alternative ways of
communicating messages, including e-mail, exist and are probably being used by
criminals.
5. State your views on ways to solve the problems of collecting the key data the FBI can
gain through Carnivore without interfering with the privacy of people not related to the
crime involved.
The case study offers at least one alternative — the control of Carnivore-type software
by the ISPs, although this can still be misused by the ISP. Encourage your students to
come up with thoughtful, creative ideas. The alternative ways that the students suggest
must be examined carefully to see if they are actually possible, and if they can be
misused. Again, students will struggle with the difficult issues of solving privacy
problems, and come to understand that agreement on these issues is difficult, if not
impossible, leading to a discussion of majority and minority in a democratic society.