MIS 314 Chapter 4

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1) Information rights and obligations: What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect? (2) Property rights and obligations: How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society in which tracing and accounting for ownership are difficult and ignoring such property rights is so easy? (3) Accountability and control: Who can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm done to individual and collective information and property rights? (4) System quality: What standards of data and system quality should we demand to protect individual rights and the safety of society? (5) Quality of life: What values should be preserved in an information and knowledge-based society? Which institutions should we protect from violation? Which cultural values and practices does the new information technology support? I think the hardest of these moral dimensions to deal with is quality of life, because it deals with changing values. It is extremely difficult to do this due to the fact that different groups have varying values. Values aren't one-size-fits-all, but are determined, instead, by age, race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and many other factors. Because of this, it seems impossible to arrive at a majority consensus on which values and institutions should be protected, which means that many individuals will always be unhappy with the standard set.

Mobile device growth: Individual cell phones may be tracked without user consent or knowledge Date storage costs rapidly declining: Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals, so there are no limits on the data collected about you Networking advances: The cost of moving data and making it accessible from anywhere falls exponentially, which makes access to data more difficult to control

NORA - non-obvious relationship awareness; technology that can find obscure hidden connections between people or other entities by analyzing information from many different sources to correlate relationships It takes information from different sources, like job applications and telephone records, and correlates relationships to find obscure connections to help identify criminals or terrorists. It scans data and extracts information as the data is being generated to instantly find connections. For example, NORA could reveal if a man at an airline ticket counter shares a phone number with a known terrorist before that person boards the plane.

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The steps are: (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 that you can reasonably take; and (5) identify the potential consequences of your options

(1) Golden rule - do onto others as you would have them do onto you. (2) Kant's categorical imperative - if an action isn't right for everyone to take, than it is not right for anyone to take. (3) Slippery slope rule - If an action cannot be taken repeatedly it's not right to take at all. (4) Utilitarian principle - Take action that achieves higher or greater value than others. (5) Risk aversion principle - Taking an action that produces the least amount of harm or potential downside. (6) "No free lunch" Rule - virtually all tangible assets that are appealing are owned by someone, who most likely expects payment for use of them. Therefore, nothing is society is completely free.

Responsibility is first key element in ethical action. Responsibility whether as a group, individual, or organization accepts the potential costs, duties, and obligations for its decisions. Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions where mechanisms are put in place as to who is responsible for a given action. Liability is a feature of political system where a body of law in place permits individuals to recover damages done to them by others. These concepts are related in that there is a clear interconnectedness in our decision making progress. Ex -> make a choice that is well thought out (exercising responsibility), accepting the potential upsides and downsides for said decision (being accountable), and knowing how to fix and or uses consequences of an action on others (being liable).

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One answer might be that we should depend upon the Federal Trade Commission Fair Information Practice Principles and that as long as these principles are not ignored or overset, personal privacy does not conflict with homeland security. This is a weak argument. Other issues involve online privacy, employee monitoring, tradeoffs between security and privacy and good business results versus privacy.

A cookie works as follows: A user opens a web browser and selects a website to visit. The user's computer sends a request for information to the server running the website. At the same time the server sends a cookie—a data file containing information like an encrypted user ID and information about when the user visited and what he did on the site. The user's computer receives the cookie and places it in a file on the hard drive. Whenever the user goes back to the website, the server running the site retrieves the cookie to help identify the user.

In Europe, privacy protection is much more stringent than in the United States. Unlike the United States, European countries do not allow businesses to use personally identifiable information without consumers' prior consent. On October 25, 1998, the European Commission's Directive on Data Protection went into effect, broadening privacy protection in the European Union (EU) nations. The directive requires companies to inform people when they collect information about them and disclose how it will be stored and used. Customers must provide their informed consent before any company can legally use data about them, and they have the right to access that information, correct it, and request that no further data be collected. Informed consent can be defined as consent given with knowledge of all the facts needed to make a rational decision. EU member nations must translate these principles into their own laws and cannot transfer personal data to countries, such as the United States, that do not have similar privacy protection regulations. In 2009, the European Parliament passed new rules governing the use of third-party cookies for behavioral tracking purposes. These new rules were implemented in May 2011 and require website visitors to give explicit consent to be tracked by cookies. Websites are required to have highly visible warnings on their pages if third-party cookies are being used. In January 2012, the EU issued significant proposed changes to its data protection rules, the first overhaul since 1995. The new rules would apply to all companies providing services in Europe and require Internet companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, and others to obtain explicit consent from consumers about the use of their personal data, delete information at the user's request (based on the right to be forgotten), and retain information only as long as absolutely necessary. In 2014, the European Parliament gave strong support to significant changes in privacy policies by extending greater control to users of the Internet. Although the privacy policies of United States firms (in contrast to the government's) are largely voluntary, in Europe, corporate privacy policies are mandated and more consistent across jurisdictions. Among the changes being discussed are a requirement for firms to inform users before collecting data, every time they collect data, and how it will be used. Users would have to give consent to any data collection. Other proposals call for users to have a right of access to personal data, and the right to be forgotten. The right to be forgotten was upheld by a European Union court in 2014, and since then, Google has had to respond to more than 200,000 requests to remove personal information from its search engine.

In 2011, Apple sued Samsung for violating its patents for iPhones, iPads, and iPods. On August 24, 2012, a California jury in federal district court delivered a decisive victory to Apple and a stunning defeat to Samsung. The jury awarded Apple $1 billion in damages. The decision established criteria for determining just how close a competitor can come to an industry-leading and standard-setting product like Apple's iPhone before it violates the design and utility patents of the leading firm. The same court ruled that Samsung could not sell its new tablet computer (Galaxy 10.1) in the United States. In a later patent dispute, Samsung won an infringement case against Apple. In June 2013, the United States International Trade Commission issued a ban for a handful of older iPhone and iPad devices because they violated Samsun patents from years ago. In 2014, Apple sued Samsung again, claiming infringement of five patents. The patents cover hardware and software techniques for handling photos, videos, and lists used on the popular Galaxy 5. Apple sought $2 billion in damages. In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals reaffirmed that Samsung had copied specific design patents, but dropped the damages Apple was granted to $930 million. To make matters more complicated, Apple has been one of Samsung's largest customers for flash memory processors, graphic chips, solid-state drives, and display parts that are used in Apple's iPhones, iPads, iPod Touch devices, and MacBooks. The Samsung and Apple patent cases are indicative of the complex relationships among the leading computer firms.

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Student answers will vary, but should include a definition of privacy and an attempt to differentiate between anonymity and privacy, as well as an understanding that anonymity can result in a breakdown of clear accountability or responsibility for actions. A sample answer is: Privacy is the claim to be left alone, free from surveillance. This is different from anonymity, in which nobody knows who you are or what actions you take even in a public arena. Some individuals, if they feel they are anonymous, may have lapses in ethical behavior because anonymity means they are no longer accountable for their actions. I don't know if anonymity should be a right, but perhaps anonymity should not be permissible for some types of communication.

Student answers will vary, but should include a description of the software manufacturer's responsibility in software quality and an understanding of the difference between social concerns (culture, lifestyle effects) and political concerns (legal, institutional effects). A sample answer is: The central quality-related ethical issue that software quality raises is what responsibility does a software manufacturer have in the performance of its software? At what point can the manufacturer conclude that its software achieves an adequate level of quality? The leading social issue raised by quality is: how is our society affected by low-quality software and is this a concern? And how much accountability should the software manufacturer have? The central political concern raised by software quality is whether and how to enforce software quality minimums and standards, and what institutions are thus also held accountable.

Electronic voting machines can be seen as beneficial by making voting 1: Easy to accomplish and tabulate. However, it may be easier to tamper with electronic voting machines than with countable paper ballots. In terms of information rights, it seems possible that methods could be set up to determine how an individual has voted and to store and disseminate this knowledge. Manufacturers of voting machines claim property rights to the voting software, which means that if the software is protected from inspection, there is no regulation in how the software operates or how accurate it is. In terms of accountability and control, if an electronic voting system malfunctions, will it be the responsibility of the government, of the company manufacturing the machines or software, or the programmers who programmed the software? The dimension of system quality raises questions of how the level of accuracy of the machines is to be judged and what level is acceptable? In terms of quality of life, while it may make voting easier and quicker, does the vulnerability to abuse of these systems pose a threat to the democratic principle of one person, one vote?

The digital divide relates to the fact that information, knowledge, computers, and access to digital and information resources through educational institutions and public libraries are inequitably distributed along ethnic and social class lines. Several studies have found that poor and minority groups in the United States are less likely to have computers or online Internet access even though computer ownership and Internet access have soared in the past five years. Although the gap in computer access is narrowing, higher-income families in each ethnic group are still more likely to have home computers and broadband Internet access than lower-income families in the same group. Moreover, the children of higher-income families are far more likely to use their Internet access to pursue educational goals, whereas lower-income children are much more likely to spend time on entertainment and games. Left uncorrected, this digital divide could lead to a society of information haves, computer literate and skilled, versus a large group of information have-nots, computer illiterate and unskilled. Public interest groups want to narrow this digital divide by making digital information services—including the Internet—available to virtually everyone, just as basic telephone service is now

A common occupational disease today is repetitive stress injury (RSI). RSI occurs when muscle groups are forced through repetitive actions often with high-impact loads (such as tennis) or tens of thousands of repetitions under low-impact loads (such as working at a computer keyboard). The incidence of repetitive stress syndrome is estimated to be as much as one-third of the labor force and accounts for one-third of all disability cases. The single largest source of RSI is computer keyboards. The most common kind of computer-related RSI is carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), in which pressure on the median nerve through the wrist's bony structure, called a carpal tunnel, produces pain. The pressure is caused by constant repetition of keystrokes. Symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome include numbness, shooting pain, inability to grasp objects, and tingling. Millions of workers have been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. It affects an estimated 3 percent to 6 percent of the workforce. RSI is not the only occupational illness computers cause. Back and neck pain, leg stress, and foot pain also result from poor ergonomic designs of workstations. Computer vision syndrome (CVS) refers to any eyestrain condition related to display screen use in desktop computers, laptops, e-readers, smartphones, and handheld video games. CVS affects about 90 percent of people who spend three hours or more per day at a computer. Its symptoms, which are usually temporary, include headaches, blurred vision, and dry and irritated eyes.