Privacy history
In
the late 19th century, the invention of cameras spurred similar ethical
debates as the internet does today. During a seminar of Harvard Law Review in 1890, Warren and Brandeis defined privacy from an ethical and moral point of view to be:
- central to dignity and individuality and personhood. Privacy is also indispensable to a sense of autonomy — to 'a feeling that there is an area of an individual's life that is totally under his or her control, an area that is free from outside intrusion.' The deprivation of privacy can even endanger a person's health.
Over 100 years later, the internet and proliferation of private data through governments and ecommerce is an area which requires a new round of ethical debate involving a person's privacy.
Privacy can be decomposed to the limitation of others' access to
an individual with "three elements of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude."
Anonymity refers to the individual's right to protection from undesired
attention. Solitude refers to the lack of physical proximity of an
individual to others. Secrecy refers to the protection of personalized
information from being freely distributed.
Individuals surrender private information when conducting
transactions and registering for services. Ethical business practice
protects the privacy of their customers by securing information which may contribute to the loss of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude.
Credit card information, social security numbers, phone numbers,
mothers' maiden names, addresses and phone numbers freely collected and
shared over the internet may lead to a loss of Privacy.
Fraud and impersonation are some of the malicious activities that
occur due to the direct or indirect abuse of private information. Identity theft
is rising rapidly due to the availability of private information in the
internet. For instance, seven million Americans fell victim to
identity theft in 2002,and nearly 12 million Americans were victims of
identity theft in 2011 making it the fastest growing crime in the United
States.
Public records search engines and databases are the main culprits contributing to the rise of cybercrime.
Listed below are a few recommendations to restrict online databases from proliferating sensitive personnel information.
- Exclude sensitive unique identifiers from database records such as social security numbers, birth dates, hometown and mothers' maiden names.
- Exclude phone numbers that are normally unlisted.
- Clear provision of a method which allows people to have their names removed from a database.
- Banning the reverse social security number lookup services.
Private data collection
Data
warehouses are used today to collect and store huge amounts of personal
data and consumer transactions. These facilities can preserve large
volumes of consumer information for an indefinite amount of time. Some
of the key architectures contributing to the erosion of privacy include
databases, cookies and spyware.
Some may argue that data warehouses are supposed to stand alone
and be protected. However, the fact is enough personal information can
be gathered from corporate websites and social networking sites to
initiate a reverse lookup. Therefore, is it not important to address
some of the ethical issues regarding how protected data ends up in the
public domain?
As a result, identity theft protection businesses are on the rise. Companies such as LifeLock and JPMorgan Chase have begun to capitalize on selling identity theft protection insurance.
Governments also have been criticized for collaborating with Google Earth to spy on us. "Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us" is the title of a The Guardian
article by Yasha Levin who goes on to state 'We knew that being
connected had a price – our data. But we didn’t care. Then it turned out
that Google’s main clients included the military and intelligence
agencies`.
Property
Ethical debate has long included the concept of property.
This concept has created many clashes in the world of cyberethics.
One philosophy of the internet is centered around the freedom of
information. The controversy over ownership occurs when the property of
information is infringed upon or uncertain.
Intellectual property rights
The ever-increasing speed of the internet and the emergence of compression technology, such as mp3 opened the doors to Peer-to-peer file sharing, a technology that allowed users to anonymously transfer files to each other, previously seen on programs such as Napster or now seen through communications protocol such as BitTorrent. Much of this, however, was copyrighted music and illegal to transfer to other users. Whether it is ethical to transfer copyrighted media is another question.
Proponents of unrestricted file sharing point out how file
sharing has given people broader and faster access to media, has
increased exposure to new artists, and has reduced the costs of
transferring media (including less environmental damage). Supporters of
restrictions on file sharing argue that we must protect the income of
our artists and other people who work to create our media. This argument
is partially answered by pointing to the small proportion of money
artists receive from the legitimate sale of media.
We also see a similar debate over intellectual property rights in
respect to software ownership. The two opposing views are for closed
source software distributed under restrictive licenses or for free and open source software.
The argument can be made that restrictions are required because
companies would not invest weeks and months in development if there were
no incentive for revenue generated from sales and licensing fees. A
counter argument to this is that standing on shoulders of giants is far
cheaper when the giants do not hold IP rights. Some proponents for open source believe that all programs should be available to anyone who wants to study them.
Digital rights management (DRM)
With the introduction of digital rights management
software, new issues are raised over whether the subverting of DRM is
ethical. Some champion the hackers of DRM as defenders of users' rights,
allowing the blind to make audio books of PDFs they receive, allowing
people to burn music they have legitimately bought to CD or to transfer
it to a new computer. Others see this as nothing but simply a violation
of the rights of the intellectual property holders, opening the door to
uncompensated use of copyrighted media.
Accessibility, censorship and filtering
Accessibility,
censorship and filtering bring up many ethical issues that have several
branches in cyberethics. Many questions have arisen which continue to
challenge our understanding of privacy, security and our participation
in society. Throughout the centuries mechanisms have been constructed
in the name of protection and security. Today the applications are in
the form of software that filters domains and content so that they may
not be easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention or on
a personal and business level through free or content-control software. Internet censorship
and filtering are used to control or suppress the publishing or
accessing of information. The legal issues are similar to offline censorship
and filtering. The same arguments that apply to offline censorship and
filtering apply to online censorship and filtering; whether people are
better off with free access to information or should be protected from
what is considered by a governing body as harmful, indecent or illicit.
The fear of access by minors drives much of the concern and many online
advocate groups have sprung up to raise awareness and of controlling
the accessibility of minors to the internet.
Censorship and filtering occurs on small to large scales, whether
it be a company restricting their employees' access to cyberspace by
blocking certain websites which are deemed as relevant only to personal
usage and therefore damaging to productivity or on a larger scale where a
government creates large firewalls which censor and filter access to
certain information available online frequently from outside their
country to their citizens and anyone within their borders. One of the
most famous examples of a country controlling access is the Golden Shield Project,
also referred to as the Great Firewall of China, a censorship and
surveillance project set up and operated by the People's Republic of
China. Another instance is the 2000 case of the League Against Racism
and Antisemitism (LICRA), French Union of Jewish Students, vs. Yahoo!
Inc (USA) and Yahoo! France, where the French Court declared that
"access by French Internet users to the auction website containing Nazi
objects constituted a contravention of French law and an offence to the
'collective memory' of the country and that the simple act of displaying
such objects (e.g. exhibition of uniforms, insignia or emblems
resembling those worn or displayed by the Nazis) in France constitutes a
violation of the Article R645-1 of the Penal Code and is therefore
considered as a threat to internal public order."
Since the French judicial ruling many websites must abide by the rules of the countries in which they are accessible.
Freedom of information
Freedom of information, that is the freedom of speech
as well as the freedom to seek, obtain and impart information brings up
the question of who or what, has the jurisdiction in cyberspace. The
right of freedom of information is commonly subject to limitations
dependent upon the country, society and culture concerned.
Generally there are three standpoints on the issue as it relates
to the internet. First is the argument that the internet is a form of
media, put out and accessed by citizens of governments and therefore
should be regulated by each individual government within the borders of
their respective jurisdictions. Second, is that, "Governments of the
Industrial World... have no sovereignty [over the Internet] ... We have
no elected government, nor are we likely to have one,... You have no
moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we
have true reason to fear."
A third party believes that the internet supersedes all tangible borders
such as the borders of countries, authority should be given to an
international body since what is legal in one country may be against the
law in another.
Digital divide
An issue specific to the ethical issues of the freedom of information
is what is known as the digital divide. This refers to the unequal socio-economic divide between those who have had access to digital and information technology, such as cyberspace,
and those who have had limited or no access at all. This gap of access
between countries or regions of the world is called the global digital divide.
Sexuality and pornography
Sexuality in terms of sexual orientation, infidelity, sex with or between minors, public display and pornography
have always stirred ethical controversy. These issues are reflected
online to varying degrees. In terms of its resonance, the historical
development of the online pornography industry and user-generated
content have been the studied by media academics. One of the largest cyberethical debates is over the regulation, distribution and accessibility of pornography online.
Hardcore pornographic material is generally controlled by governments
with laws regarding how old one has to be to obtain it and what forms
are acceptable or not. The availability of pornography online calls
into question jurisdiction as well as brings up the problem of
regulation in particular over child pornography,
which is illegal in most countries, as well as pornography involving
violence or animals, which is restricted within most countries.
Gambling
Gambling is often a topic in ethical debate as some view it as
inherently wrong and support prohibition or controls while others
advocate no legal . "Between these extremes lies a multitude of
opinions on what types of gambling the government should permit and
where it should be allowed to take place. Discussion of gambling forces
public policy makers to deal with issues as diverse as addiction, tribal
rights, taxation, senior living, professional and college sports,
organized crime, neurobiology, suicide, divorce, and religion."
Due to its controversy, gambling is either banned or heavily controlled
on local or national levels. The accessibility of the internet and its
ability to cross geographic-borders have led to illegal online gambling, often offshore operations.
Over the years online gambling, both legal and illegal, has grown
exponentially which has led to difficulties in regulation. This enormous
growth has even called into question by some the ethical place of
gambling online.
Related organizations
The following organizations are of notable interest in cyberethics debates:
- International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
- Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group: Computers and Society (SIGCAS)
- Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
- International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE)
- Directions and Implications in Advanced Computing (DIAC)
- The Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR)
- Cyber-Rights and Cyber-liberties
- International Journal of Cyber Ethics in Education (IJCEE)
Codes of ethics in computing
Four notable examples of ethics codes for IT professionals are listed below:
RFC 1087
In January 1989, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) in RFC 1087 defines an activity as unethical and unacceptable if it:
- Seeks to gain unauthorized access to the resources of the Internet.
- Disrupts the intended use of the Internet.
- Wastes resources (people, capacity, computer) through such actions.
- Destroys the integrity of computer-based information, or
- Compromises the privacy of users.
The Code of Fair Information Practices
The Code of Fair Information Practices
is based on five principles outlining the requirements for records
keeping systems. This requirement was implemented in 1973 by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
- There must be no personal data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret.
- There must be a way for a person to find out what information about the person is in a record and how it is used.
- There must be a way for a person to prevent information about the person that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without the person's consent.
- There must be a way for a person to correct or amend a record of identifiable information about the person.
- Any organization creating, maintaining, using, or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take precautions to prevent misuses of the data.
Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics
The ethical values as defined in 1992 by the Computer Ethics Institute;
a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance technology by
ethical means, lists these ten rules as a guide to computer ethics:
- Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people.
- Thou shalt not interfere with other people's computer work.
- Thou shalt not snoop around in other people's computer files.
- Thou shalt not use a computer to steal.
- Thou shalt not use a computer to bear false witness.
- Thou shalt not copy or use proprietary software for which you have not paid.
- Thou shalt not use other people's computer resources without authorization or proper compensation.
- Thou shalt not appropriate other people's intellectual output.
- Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you are writing or the system you are designing.
- Thou shalt always use a computer in ways that ensure consideration and respect for your fellow humans.
(ISC)² Code of Ethics
(ISC)², a professional association which seeks to inspire a safe and secure cyber world, has further defined its own code of ethics. The code is based on four canons, under a general preamble.
Code of Ethics Preamble:
The safety and welfare of society and the common good, duty to
our principles, and to each other, requires that we adhere, and be seen
to adhere, to the highest ethical standards of behavior.
Therefore, strict adherence to this Code is a condition of
certification.
Code of Ethics Canons:
Canon One: Protect society, the common good, necessary public trust and confidence, and the infrastructure.
Canon Two: Act honorably, honestly, justly, responsibly, and legally.
Canon Three: Provide diligent and competent service to principles.
Canon Four: Advance and protect the profession.
