Module 10: Ethics and Privacy Flashcards
What is Ethics?
Ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals use to make choices that guide their behaviour
What are the four general categories of ethical issues in IT applications?
Privacy: About collecting, storing and disseminating information about individuals
Property: Involves the ownership and value of information
Accuracy: Involves the authenticity, fidelity, and accuracy of information that is collected and processed
Accessibility: Revolve around who should have access to information and whether fees should be paid for such access
What is privacy?
Privacy is the right to be left alone and to be free of unreasonable personal intrutions
What is Information privacy?
It is the right to determine when, and to what extent, information about you can be gathered and/or communicated to others
What is privacy right?
It applies to individuals, groups, and institutions
What are the two rules of defining privacy?
The right of privacy is not absolute. Your privacy must be balanced against the needs of society
The public’s right to know supersedes the individual’s right of privacy
What are the impacts of IT technologies on privacy?
Data aggregators and profiling (creation of digital dossiers)
Electronic surveillance
Personal Information in Databases
Information on Internet Bulletin Boards, Newsgroups, and Social Networking Sites
What are the four ethical frameworks?
Utilitarian: provides the most good or does the least harm
Rights: best protects and respects the moral rights of the affected parties
Fairness: treats all humans equally, or if unequally, then fairly, based on some defensible standard
Common good: respect and compassion for all others in the basis for ethical actions
What is a code of ethics?
It is a collection of principles that are intended to guide decision making by members of an organization
What do the fundamental tenets of ethics include?
Responsibility: accepting consequences
Accountability: determining who is responsible
Liability: legal concept about having the right to recover for damages done
What are data aggregators?
They collect public and non-public data then integrate these data to form digital dossiers on most adults in North America
What does the law support in terms of electronic surveillance?
The law supports the right of employers to read their employees’ e-mail and other electronic documents and to monitor their employees’ Internet use
What are some examples of personal information databases?
Banks and financial institutions
Utility companies
Employers
Government agencies
Credit reporting agencies
Hospitals
Schools and universities
Retail establishments
What are privacy policies or privacy codes?
They are an organization’s guidelines for protecting the privacy of its customers, clients and employees
What are some of the aspects of international privacy?
About 50 countries have some form of data-protection laws. The European Commission Data Protection Officer lists those in the European Union
Laws of one country may conflict with those of other countries, or they require specific security measures
Some countries have no privacy laws at all
Whose laws have jurisdiction when records are stored in a different country for reprocessing or retransmission purposes would be determined by a court of law
