Information Technology Ethics Research Articles

The ethical attitudes of information technology professionals: a comparative study between the USA and the Middle East

This paper aims at investigating comparatively the ethical orientation of information technology (IT) professionals in the Middle East and the United States. It tests for attitudes toward and awareness of ethically-related issues, namely intellectual property, privacy and other general ethical IT aspects. In addition, through a comparison between the two regions, this paper intends to examine whether differences in IT professional demographics and characteristics, including gender and academic level, have any impact on attitudes to business ethics. A t test is used to establish significant differences between the targeted samples, while an ANOVA F-test is conducted to determine significant differences among the sample countries on a group basis. The results show a general awareness of ethical issues concerning information technology, and no significant differences are found between the two samples. However, different ethical attitudes are reported among respondents in terms of their reactions to the targeted IT ethical aspects. On an individual sample basis, the results about gender support the claim that male and female respondents are different, while mixed results are revealed for the influence of academic level on attitudes towards IT ethics. For intellectual property, the results are significant regarding ethical attitude differences between Middle-Eastern professionals and their counterparts in the US, while no significance differences are reported in terms of privacy.

Technology with No Human Responsibility?

A major thrust of Richard De George’s book, The Ethics of Information Technology and Business (2003), was to draw attention to the ethical challenges for business as business practices were being reconfigured as a result of the introduction of computing and information technology. The topics on which he focused and his analysis are still relevant a decade later. Today privacy issues are pervasive. Intellectual and other kinds of property rights in electronic data and devices continue to challenge courts of law and legislative bodies. E-business is now the norm as most businesses are online in some form or another. The nature of work continues to change as new technologies are introduced; the new technologies change what workers do, when, where, and how they do it, and the extent to which they are monitored. As De George himself wrote, he was addressing a rapidly moving target, and the target—changes in the way business is done due to changes in computing and information technology—continues to move. The starting place for De George’s analysis in The Ethics of Information Technology and Business is a critique of what he refers to as the myth of amoral computing and information technology (MACIT). This myth, he claims, blinds us to the powerful changes taking place as a result of computing and information technology. Despite increased awareness today of many of the issues identified by De George, the business community and the public still seem to hold some version of the MACIT. That is, the belief that technological choices are amoral is fairly common even in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary, evidence indicating that technological choices have moral consequences. De George agrees with at least part of the MACIT; he acknowledges that it ‘‘like all myths, partially reveals and partially hides reality.’’ He writes:

EVALUATION OF ETHICAL ISSUES IN THE KNOWLEDGE AGE: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Unethical information technology (IT) conduct is estimated to cost billions of dollars in deficits for enterprises. Included in this unethical behavior are issues associated with the knowledge age. Many IT ethics concerns do not have guidelines that are well recognized or broadly accepted. This study will explore the ethical perception of a diverse group of knowledge workers. It will also examine the effects of deterrents, individual factors and external variables to determine if there are noted differences in ethical perceptions that can be explained by these variables.

‘FORWARD’ IN THE NAME OF GOD: Issue in Email Ethics

Computer ethics, or more broadly, Information Technology (IT) ethics, is often concerned with issues about privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility and framing of policies and rules on the features. While ethical issues on these topics are important, issues about IT ethics apply more broadly. The purpose of ethics is not just to draft new policies or legal codes. Ethics also aims to probe and bring into limelight for ethical deliberations those issues, which have escaped policy formulations or human introspection. This paper tries to address one such ethical issue. This paper concerns with email ethics and with one of the features of emailing - ‘forwarding’. As an applied ethics domain, I have tried to use some samples of forwarded mails. Through the analysis of the given sample mails, I claim that (1) this issue of ‘forwarding’ falls well outside the domain of framing ethical policies and (2) it is a matter of ethical concern. I have addressed this ethical concern by drawing a criterion to judge if one’s act of ‘forwarding’ a mail is ethical act or not.

Material morality: towards a posthumanist ethics of technology

Morality is commonly understood to consist of the values, norms, and habits that are taken to be self-evident in a specific group of people. In daily life, morality is thought to come forward in people’s judgments, their expressions of praise and blame, but their morality can also remain implicit in what people think they have to do, what it is worthwhile to strive for, their feelings of achievement and satisfaction, and their sense of shame, guilt, regret or uneasiness about how things are going. Ethics, by contrast, is taken to be a reflective discipline about this morality of people. Ethics investigates morality and asks what the meaning of our moral judgments actually is, what they are about, and how we can justify them or find out that something should be changed. What comes forward in these presuppositions is that in the most common understandings, morality and ethics figure as distinctively human affairs. This humanist understanding of ethics is a heritage of our Enlightenment past, in which modern sciences were construed on the basis of an ontological distinction between subjects and objects which also influenced the most influential approaches to ethics that were formed during that period. A Kantian deontologist ethics focuses on the subject as a source of ethics, making autonomous choice the source of moral agency. Utilitarian consequentialist ethics, such as Jeremy Bentham proposed, shapes ethics according to a scientific model. By means of an analogy between the meaning of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and experiences of pain and pleasure, Bentham gave moral judgments a basis in experiences of the objective world. In view of this past, it is unsurprising that ethical reflections on technology have most commonly focused on human beings as well. Ethics of technology was just a variation of applied ethics—biomedical ethics, ethics of information technology, ethics of nanotechnology—which investigate specific problems that technologies

Much Ado About Something: An Ethic of the Common Good for Information Technology

As the culture of information technology grows and with it the exacerbation of associated problems, so does the body of literature that seeks to reflect on its impact and prospects. The advancements in information technology tend to be outpacing critical reflection and solid ethical analysis. The quality of the foundational ethical work done in information technology ethics has been inadequate, consisting of applied ethics or an appeal to law. This article considers how the richer perspective—the common good, as expressed through the lens of the Roman Catholic Church—can serve as a hermeneutic in the field of information technology ethics, offering a more substantial foundation to address pressing controversial issues associated with this burgeoning field and function as a guide for future developments in this industry. The common good can supplement the operative ways of appealing to law and business ethics to address crime and abuse associated with the World Wide Web with a specifically Roman Catholic paradigm and, in turn, offer a broader and richer appreciation of the societal-wide context that information technology impacts.

Ethical Decision Making with Information Systems Students

Information Technology (IT) is a new tool in education that continually changes and offers new opportunities for teaching and learning. In general, the effects of IT are complex and depend upon people’s decisions about development and use. This study investigates the ethical issues in education in terms of Information Systems students’ attitudes at Saudi universities towards digital piracy. The differences in the ethical decision-making process, ethical awareness, and intention to perform questionable acts is examined. The authors tested for differences in attitudes toward eighteen different questionable actions by using three different factors (gender, age, and university level). The measures of awareness capture the extent to which respondents felt that a particular action was unethical according to each of several ethical criteria. This work explored information technology ethics in several ways. The work analyzed whether information technology use is viewed by individuals as an ethical topic and demographic differences were explored. Significant differences were found in many cases between demographic groups based on ethical issues. These findings can be used to target and address ethical issues and enforcement in information systems curriculum.

The Dubai tennis ball machine

Subject area Ethics in IT, community informatics, management. Study level/applicability Undergraduate and postgraduate information technology and citizens' rights, strategic decision making. Case overview This case spotlights Athlete Sports in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). It focuses on the malfunction of the company's equipment that is rented from ABC Sports Equipment. Athlete Sports has been in the UAE over a decade and has positioned itself fairly at the top due to its qualified coaches and quality of facilities it provides. The case highlights the company's transition from owning equipment to leasing equipment that increases profits. However, it also sheds light on ABC Sports' venture into code reusability in order to upgrade equipments faster. The case looks closely at the ultimate consequences of ABC Sports' practice and the impact it has on Athlete's Sports' clients and the subsequent decisions the managers are expected to make. Expected learning outcomes This case can be used to teach strategic decision making, and ethics in information technology. Supplementary materials A teaching note is available on request.

Let’s Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality

Let’s Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality

3rd ICTs and Society Meeting; Paper Session - Theorizing the Internet; Paper 4: A Methodological Reflection on Converging Technologies and Their Relevance to Informa-tion Ethics

In light of converging technologies, there is a clear sense that ethicists of various technological domains are coming together. Or, that they should come together. Yet, despite increasing cooperation and boundary-crossing in various fields of the ethics of technology, these efforts remain mostly at topical level. Relatively little attention has been given to issues on methodologies. The current paper aims to contribute to the current research by raising the methodological issues. In this paper, my objective is to argue that ethics of Information Technology (or Information Ethics (IE)) can benefit from the insights in other fields of the ethics of technology. Drawing the insights from other fields of the ethics of technology, I shall propose a systematic account of an Empirical Information Ethics (EIE)

3rd ICTs and Society Meeting; Paper Session - Theorizing the Internet; Paper 4: A Methodological Reflection on Converging Technologies and Their Relevance to Informa-tion Ethics

In light of converging technologies, there is a clear sense that ethicists of various technological domains are coming together. Or, that they should come together. Yet, despite increasing cooperation and boundary-crossing in various fields of the ethics of technology, these efforts remain mostly at topical level. Relatively little attention has been given to issues on methodologies. The current paper aims to contribute to the current research by raising the methodological issues. In this paper, my objective is to argue that ethics of Information Technology (or Information Ethics (IE)) can benefit from the insights in other fields of the ethics of technology. Drawing the insights from other fields of the ethics of technology, I shall propose a systematic account of an Empirical Information Ethics (EIE)

On the Ethics of Democratic Access to Web Information

Floridi’s work, although diverse and multifaceted, portrays a solid coherence across his different lines of work. Among his wealth of interests and results, we highlight his recent work on information logics, on the ethics of information technology, and his rigorous (and vigorous) philosophical analysis of recent technological trends and developments in information technology. In the present article we illustrate, by means of some connecting arguments, the diversity and coherence of Floridi’s work. We also show how his work, although fundamentally philosophical in nature, can be used to build solid foundations for scientific and entrepreneurial endeavours of higher quality. More specifically, we discuss how the combination of results from the three lines of work referred to above can be used as ground for the organisation of higher quality programmes to augment the capabilities and effectiveness of governmental systems through information and communications technology, a trend that has been explored in many nations and that has been coined Electronic Government. Electronic Government programmes that improve the capabilities of citizens to interact with each other and with governments, as well as the capabilities of governments to listen to the needs and aspirations of citizens, have the potential to contribute to the construction of more democratic states. Electronic Government systems that rely on ready made models to prescribe to citizens how best they should interact with each other and with the public administration are, however, by construction non-democratic. Hence, it can be a moral and ethical matter for governments to choose which line of technological development they take.

Respect for persons, identity, and information technology

There is surprisingly little attention in Information Technology ethics to respect for persons, either as an ethical issue or as a core value of IT ethics or as a conceptual tool for discussing ethical issues of IT. In this, IT ethics is very different from another field of applied ethics, bioethics, where respect is a core value and conceptual tool. This paper argues that there is value in thinking about ethical issues related to information technologies, especially, though not exclusively, issues concerning identity and identity management, explicitly in terms of respect for persons understood as a core value of IT ethics. After explicating respect for persons, the paper identifies a number of ways in which putting the concept of respect for persons explicitly at the center of both IT practice and IT ethics could be valuable, then examines some of the implicit and problematic assumptions about persons, their identities, and respect that are built into the design, implementation, and use of information technologies and are taken for granted in discussions in IT ethics. The discussion concludes by asking how better conceptions of respect for persons might be better employed in IT contexts or brought better to bear on specific issues concerning identity in IT contexts.

Information technology ethics – By Soraj Hongladarom & Charles Ess

The article reviews the book Information technology ethics, by Soraj Hongladarom and Charles Ess.

Ethical Issues in Information Technology

This research examines the impact of education on the ethical decision-making outcomes of adult learners in the area of information technology (IT). This study sheds light on the research question “Does IT ethics education make a difference?”, and more specifically, “Do ethics courses influence decisions regarding IT ethical issues in adult learners?” In a field study of 78 pre- and post-test surveys, we found that graduate students who took a course in IT ethics made different decisions than those made at the start of the term, for 2 of 6 ethical issues. The ethical issues described in this article are particularly relevant in today’s knowledge economy. Implications for IT ethics education and future research in the area are discussed.

Ethics vs. IT Ethics: Do Undergraduate Students Perceive a Difference?

Do undergraduate students perceive that it is more acceptable to ‹cheat’ using information technology (IT) than it is to cheat without the use of IT? Do business discipline-related majors cheat more than non-business discipline-related majors? Do undergraduate students perceive it to be more acceptable for them personally to cheat than for others to cheat? Questionnaires were administered to undergraduate students at five geographical academic locations in the spring, 2006 and fall 2006 and spring, 2007. A total of 708 usable questionnaires were returned including 532 from students majoring in business-related disciplines and 139 from students majoring in non-business related disciplines (37 were undecided). It appears that in terms of intellectual property violations, undergraduate students in general find cheating using IT more acceptable than cheating without the use of IT. It also appears that undergraduate students perceive that it is relatively more acceptable for them to personally cheat when using IT than for others to cheat when using IT, although this is reversed when IT is not involved. No significant differences on these issues were found between undergraduate students having business discipline-related majors and those having non-business discipline-related majors.

Encyclopedia of Information Ethics and Security

Rapid developments in information and communication technologies have created new security threats along with ethical dilemmas. These developments have been so fast that appropriate security precautions and ethical codes fail to keep pace with the technological developments. In this respect, education of both professionals and ordinary citizens regarding information technology ethics carries utmost importance. Encyclopedia of Information Ethics and Security serves as an authentic and comprehensive reference source on security and ethical issues related to information and communication technologies.

Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives

This article reviews Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Soraj Hongladarom & Charles Ess.

A Review of the Impact of ACM Code of Conduct on Information Technology Moral Judgment and Intent

One of the most widely recognized code of ethics in information technology (IT) is the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Code of Ethics. Adopted in 1992, the code covers many of the key ethical areas that are encountered in information technology practice. But this code has been lightly studied in the literature, including its recognition and its acceptance. Likewise, its effectiveness in influencing moral intent has not previously been established. This manuscript reviews selected key statements from the ACM Code of Ethics to determine the level of agreement with these statements. The surveyed group includes IT students, faculty, and staff. In general, agreement on all issues is found, though varying in degree. Next, the study analyzes the relationship between ACM code agreement and ethical intent. The relationships in nearly all cases are positive and significant. Finally, it examines the influence this code has among participants in a hypothetical hostile work situation. Specifically, it examines moral intent when a supervisor recommends an action directly contrary to the code. The difference between actions in a hostile situation versus no supervisor influence is found to be significant in some cases.

Introduction: Ethics of Information Technology in Health Care

Computer-based information and communication technologies continue to transform the delivery of health care and the conception and scientific understanding of the human body and the diseases that afflict it. While information technology has the potential to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care, it also raises important ethical and social issues. This IRIE theme issue seeks to provide a forum to identify, analyse and discuss the ethical and social issues raised by various applications of information and communication technology in medicine and health care. The contributions give a flavour of the extraordinarily broad landscape shaped by the intersection of medicine, computing and ethics. In fact, their diversity suggests that much more work is needed to clarify issues and approaches, and to provide practical tools for clinicians.