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CHAPTER 4 REVIEW
To
fulfill Management Information System assignment
Compiled
By :
Arina Nurjanah C1L012022
Fatima Zakiya Razani C1L012045
Nur Dina Safitri C1L012046
FACULTY
OF ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS
JENDERAL
SOEDIRMAN UNIVERSITY
2014
4.1 Understanding Ethical and Social
Issues Related to System
Major instances of failed ethical and legal judgment
were not masterminded by information systems departments, information systems
were instrumental in many of these frauds. In many cases, the perpetrators of
these crimes artfully used financial reporting information systems to bury
their decisions from public scrutiny in the vain hope they would never be
caught.
Ethical issues in information systems have been
given new urgency by the rise of the Internet and electronic commerce. Internet
and digital firm technologies make it easier than ever to assemble, integrate,
and distribute information, unleashing new concerns about the appropriate use
of customer information, the protection of personal privacy, and the protection
of intellectual property. Other pressing ethical issues raised by information
systems include establishing accountability for the consequences of information
systems, setting standards to safeguard system quality that protects the safety
of the individual and society, and preserving values and institutions
considered essential to the quality of life in an information society. When
using information systems, it is essential to ask, What the ethical and
socially responsible course of action is.
A.
A
Model For Thinking About Ethical, Social and Political Issues
Ethical, social, and
political issues are closely linked. The ethical dilemma you may face as a
manager of information systems typically is reflected in social and political
debate.
Imagine
instead that the disturbing force is a powerful shock of new information
technology and systems hitting a society more or less at rest. Suddenly,
individual actors are confronted with new situations often not covered by the
old rules. Social institutions cannot respond overnight to these ripples—it may
take years to develop etiquette, expectations, social responsibility,
politically correct attitudes, or approved rules. Political institutions also
require time before developing new laws and often require the demonstration of
real harm before they act. In the meantime, you may have to act. You may be
forced to act in a legal gray area.
Follow
is model to illustrate the dynamics that connect ethical, social, and political
issues. This model is also useful for identifying the main moral dimensions of
the information society, which cut across various levels of action—individual,
social, and political.
B.
Five
Moral Dimensions Of The Information Age
The major ethical, social, and political
issues raised by information systems include the following moral dimensions :
a. Information
rights and obligation
In this dimension the
moral is about what information rights do individuals and organization possess with
respect to themselves and what can they protect.
b. Property
rights and obligations.
In this dimension the moral is about 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.
c. Accountability
and control.
In this dimension the moral is about who
can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm done to individual and
collective information and property rights.
d. System
quality.
In this dimension the moral is about
what standards of data and system quality should we demand to protect
individual rights and the safety of society.
e. Quality
of life.
In this dimension the moral is about
what values should be preserved in an information and knowledge-based society?
Which institutions should we protect from violation? Which cultural values and
practices are supported by the new information technology.
C.
Key
Technology Trends That Raise Ethical Issue
Ethical issues
long preceded information technology. Nevertheless, information technology has
heightened ethical concerns, taxed existing social arrangements, and made some
laws obsolete or severely crippled. Followed is a table of four key
technological trends responsible for these ethical stresses, and the impact
that raise from this trends which raising the ethical issues.
1. Computing
power doubles every 18 months.
This
doubling of computing power every 18 months has made it possible for most
organizations to use information systems for their core production processes.
As a result, our dependence on systems and our vulnerability to system errors
and poor data quality have increased. Social rules and laws have not yet
adjusted to this dependence. Standards for ensuring the accuracy and
reliability of information systems are not universally accepted or enforced.
2. Data
storage costs rapidly declining
Advances
in data storage techniques and rapidly declining storage costs have been
responsible for the multiplying databases on individuals—employees, customers,
and potential customers—maintained by private and public organizations. These
advances in data storage have made the routine violation of individual privacy
both cheap and effective. Massive data storage systems are inexpensive enough
for regional and even local retailing firms to use in identifying customers.
3. Data
analysis advances
Advances
in data analysis techniques for large pools of data are another technological
trend that heightens ethical concerns because companies and government agencies
are able to find out highly detailed personal information about individuals.
With contemporary data management tools companies can assemble and combine the
myriad pieces of information about you stored on computers much more easily
than in the past.
New
data analysis technology called nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) has
given both the government and the private sector even more powerful
profiling capabilities. NORA can take information about people from many
disparate sources, such as employment applications, telephone records,
customer listings, and “wanted” lists, and correlate relationships to find
obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or
terrorists.
NORA
technology scans data and extracts information as the data are being generated
so that it could, for example, instantly discover a man at an airline ticket
counter who shares a phone number with a known terrorist before that person
boards an airplane. The technology is considered a valuable tool for homeland
security but does have privacy implications because it can provide such
a detailed picture of the activities and associations of a single individual.
The
impact of this advance data analysis is that companies can analyze vast
quantities of data gathered on individuals to develop detailed profiles of
individual behavior.
4. Networking
advances
Advances in
networking, including the Internet, promise to greatly reduce the costs of
moving and accessing large quantities of data and open the possibility of
mining large pools of data remotely using small desktop machines, permitting an
invasion of privacy on a scale and with a precision heretofore unimaginable.
4.2 Ethics
In An Information Society
A. Basic Concepts: Responsibility,
Accountability, And Liability
Responsibility
is
a key element of ethical action. 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: It means that mechanisms
are in place to determine who took responsible action, and who is responsible. Liability is a feature of political
systems in which a body of laws is in place that permits individuals to recover
the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations. Due
process is a related feature of law-governed societies and is a process in
which laws are known and understood, and there is an ability to appeal
to higher authorities to ensure that the laws are applied correctly.
These
basic concepts form the underpinning of an ethical analysis of information
systems :
1. Information
technologies are filtered through social institutions, organizations, and
individuals.
2. Responsibility
for the consequences of technology falls clearly on the institutions,
organizations, and individual managers who choose to use the technology.
3. An
ethical, political society, individuals and others can recover damages done to
them through a set of laws characterized by due process.
B.
Ethical
Analysis
The
following five-step process should help:
1. Identify and describe clearly the facts.
Find out who did
what to whom, and where, when, and how. In many instances, you will be
surprised at the errors in the initially reported facts, and often you will
find that simply getting the facts straight helps define the solution. It also
helps to get the opposing parties involved in an ethical dilemma to agree on
the facts.
2. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the
higher-order values involved.
Ethical, social, and
political issues always reference higher values. The parties to a dispute all
claim to be pursuing higher values (e.g., freedom, privacy, protection of
property, and the free enterprise system). Typically, an ethical issue involves
a dilemma: two diametrically opposed courses of action that support worthwhile
values.
3. Identify the stakeholders
Every ethical, social,
and political issue has stakeholders: players in the game who have an interest
in the outcome, who have invested in the situation, and usually who have vocal
opinions. Find out the identity of these groups and what they want. This will
be useful later when designing a solution
4. Identify the options that you can reasonably take.
You may find that none
of the options satisfy all the interests involved, but that some options do a
better job than others. Sometimes arriving at a good or ethical solution may
not always be a balancing of consequences to stakeholders.
5. Identify the potential consequences of your
options.
Some options may be
ethically correct but disastrous from other points of view. Other options may
work in one instance but not in other similar instances.
C.
Candidate
Ethical Principles
Although
you are the only one who can decide which among many ethical principles you
will follow, and how you will prioritize them, it is helpful to consider some
ethical principles with deep roots in many cultures that have survived
throughout recorded history:
1. Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you (the Golden Rule).Putting
yourself into the place of others, and thinking of yourself as the object of
the decision, can help you think about fairness in decision making.
2. If an action is not right for everyone to
take, it is not right for anyone (Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative).
Ask yourself, “If everyone did this, could the organization, or society,
survive?”
3. If
an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all (Descartes’
rule of change). This is the slippery-slope rule: An action may bring about
a small change now that is acceptable, but if it is repeated, it would
bring unacceptable changes in the long run. In the vernacular, it might
be stated as “once started down a slippery path, you may not be able to
stop.”
4. Take
the action that achieves the higher or greater value (Utilitarian Principle).
This rule assumes you can prioritize values in a rank order and understand
the consequences of various courses of action.
5. Take the action that produces the least harm
or the least potential cost (Risk Aversion Principle). Some actions have
extremely high failure costs of very low probability (e.g., building a nuclear
generating facility in an urban area) or extremely high failure costs of
moderate probability (speeding and automobile accidents). Avoid these
high-failure-cost actions, paying greater attention to high-failure-cost
potential of moderate to high probability.
6. Assume
that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone else
unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. (This is the ethical “no
free lunch” rule.) If something someone else has created is useful to you,
it has value, and you should assume the creator wants compensation for this work.
D.
Professional
Codes Of Conduct
When
groups of people claim to be professionals, they take on special rights and
obligations because of their special claims to knowledge, wisdom, and respect.
Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by associations of professionals,
such as the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Bar Association
(ABA), the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP), and the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
E.
Some
Real-World Ethical Dilemmas
Information
systems have created new ethical dilemmas in which one set of interests is
pitted against another. For example, many of the large telephone companies in
the United States are using information technology to reduce the sizes of their
workforces. Voice recognition software reduces the need for human operators by
enabling computers to recognize a customer’s responses to a series of
computerized questions. Many companies monitor what their employees are doing
on the Internet to prevent them from wasting company resources on non-business
activities.
4.3 The Moral Dimensions Of Information Systems
A.
Information
Rights : Privacy And Freedom In The Internet Age
Privacy is
the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or
interference from other individuals or organizations, including the state. The
claim to privacy is protected in the U.S., Canadian, and German constitutions
in a variety of different ways and in other countries through various statutes.
The European Directive on Data
Protection
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. 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. Working with
the European Commission, the U.S. Department of Commerce developed a safe
harbor framework for U.S. firms. A safe harbor is a private,
self-regulating policy and enforcement mechanism that meets the objectives of
government regulators and legislation but does not involve government
regulation or enforcement.
Internet Challenges to
Privacy
Internet technology has
posed new challenges for the protection of individual privacy. Information sent
over this vast network of networks may pass through many different computer
systems before it reaches its final destination. Each of these systems is
capable of monitoring, capturing, and storing communications that pass through
it. It is possible to record many online activities, including what searches
have been conducted, which Web sites and Web pages have been visited, the
online content a person has accessed, and what items that person has inspected
or purchased over the Web.
Website can tracking history through this
:
a.
Cookies
Is
small text files deposited on a computer hard drive when a user visits Web
sites. Cookies identify the visitor’s Web browser software and track visits to
the Web site. When the visitor returns to a site that has stored a cookie, the
Web site software will search the visitor’s computer, find the cookie, and know what that person has done in the past.
Web sites using cookie
technology cannot directly obtain visitors’ names and addresses. However, if a
person has registered at a site, that information can be combined with cookie
data to identify the visitor.
b.
Web beacons
Which
also called Web bugs, are tiny objects invisibly embedded in e-mail messages
and Web pages that are designed to monitor the behavior of the user visiting a
Web site or sending e-mail. The Web beacon captures and transmits information
such as the IP address of the user’s computer, the time a Web page was viewed
and for how long, the type of Web browser that retrieved the beacon, and
previously set cookie values.
c.
Spyware
Is
secretly install itself on an Internet user’s computer by piggybacking on
larger applications. Once installed, the spyware calls out to Web sites to send
banner ads and other unsolicited material to the user, and it can also report
the user’s movements on the Internet to other computers.
Techinical
Solution : The P3P Standard
There are now tools to
help users determine the kind of personal data that can be extracted by Web
sites. The Platform for Privacy Preferences, known as P3P, enables automatic
communication of privacy policies between an e-commerce site and its visitors. P3P
provides a standard for communicating a Web site’s privacy policy to
Internet users and for comparing that policy to the user’s preferences or to
other standards, such as the FTC’s FIP guidelines or the European Directive on
Data Protection. Users can use P3P to select the level of privacy they wish to
maintain when interacting with the Web site.
B. Property
Rights: Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is considered to be intangible property created by
individuals or corporations. Intellectual property is subject to a variety of
protections under three different legal traditions:
·
Trade
Secrets
Any intellectual work product—a formula, device,
pattern, or compilation of data—used for a business purpose can be classified
as a trade secret, provided it is not based on information in the public
domain.
·
Copyright
Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of
intellectual property from having their work copied by others for any purpose
during the life of the author plus an additional 70 years after the author’s
death.
·
Patent
Law
A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly
on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years. The congressional intent behind
patent law was to ensure that inventors of new machines, devices, or methods
receive the full financial and other rewards of their labor and yet make
widespread use of the invention possible by providing detailed diagrams for
those wishing to use the idea under license from the patent’s owner.
Challenges
to Intellectual Property Rights
Contemporary information technologies, especially software,
pose severe challenges to existing intellectual property regimes and,
therefore, create significant ethical, social, and political issues. The
proliferation of electronic networks, including the Internet, has made it even
more difficult to protect intellectual property. Using networks, information
can be more widely reproduced and distributed. The Internet was designed to
transmit information freely around the world, including copyrighted
information. With the World Wide Web in particular, you can easily copy and
distribute virtually anything to thousands and even millions of people around
the world, even if they are using different types of computer systems.
Mechanisms are being developed to sell and distribute
books, articles, and other intellectual property legally on the Internet, and
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 is providing
some copyright protection. The DMCA implemented a World Intellectual Property
Organization Treaty that makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based
protections of copyrighted materials.
C. Accountability,
Liability, And Control
Along with privacy and
property laws, new information technologies are challenging existing liability
laws and social practices for holding individuals and institutions accountable.
D. System
Quality: Data Quality And System Errors
Three principal
sources of poor system performance are:
1)
software
bugs and errors,
2)
hardware
or facility failures caused by natural or other causes, and
3)
poor
input data quality.
Hence, there is a technological barrier to perfect
software, and users must be aware of the potential for catastrophic failure.
Although software bugs and facility catastrophes are likely to be widely
reported in the press, by far the most common source of business system failure
is data quality.
E. Quality
Of Life: Equity, Access, And Boundaries
Many of these negative social consequences are not
violations of individual rights or property crimes. Computers and information
technologies potentially can destroy valuable elements of our culture and
society even while they bring us benefits. Next, we briefly examine some of the
negative social consequences of systems, considering individual, social, and
political responses.
·
Balancing
Power: Center Versus Periphery
An early
fear of the computer age was that huge, centralized mainframe computers would
centralize power at corporate headquarters and in the nation’s capital.
·
Rapidity
of Change: Reduced Response Time to Competition
Information
systems have helped to create much more efficient national and international
markets. The now-more-efficient global marketplace has reduced the normal
social buffers that permitted businesses many years to adjust to competition.
·
Maintaining
Boundaries: Family, Work, and Leisure
Parts of
this book were produced on trains and planes, as well as on vacations and
during what otherwise might have been “family” time. The traditional boundaries
that separate work from family and just plain leisure have been weakened.
·
Dependence
and Vulnerability
Today, our businesses,
governments, schools, and private associations, such as churches, are
incredibly dependent on information systems and are, therefore, highly
vulnerable if these systems fail.
·
Computer
Crime and Abuse
New
technologies, including computers, create new opportunities for committing
crime by creating new valuable items to steal, new ways to steal them, and new
ways to harm others. Computer crime is the commission of illegal acts
through the use of a computer or against a computer system. Computer abuse is
the commission of acts involving a computer that may not be illegal but that
are considered unethical.
·
Employment:
Trickle-Down Technology and Reengineering Job Loss
Reengineering
work is typically hailed in the information systems community as a major
benefit of new information technology. It is much less frequently noted that
redesigning business processes could potentially cause millions of mid-level
managers and clerical workers to lose their jobs.
·
Equity
and Access: Increasing Racial and Social Class Cleavages
The impact
of systems technology on various groups in society has not been thoroughly
studied. Several studies have found that certain ethnic and income 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 is narrowing, higher-income families in each ethnic
group are still more likely to have home computers and Internet access than
lower-income families in the same group.
·
Health
Risks: RSI, CVS, and Technostress
The most
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 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.
Computer vision syndrome (CVS) refers to any eyestrain condition related to display
screen use in desktop computers, laptops, e-readers, smartphones, and hand-held
video games. Its symptoms, which are usually temporary, include headaches,
blurred vision, and dry and irritated eyes.
The newest computer-related malady is technostress,
which is stress induced by computer use. Its symptoms include aggravation,
hostility toward humans, impatience, and fatigue.
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