Ethics Assignment Portraying Agenda of Ethical Violations

Question

Task: Follow the instructions given below to complete this ethics assignment task.

• Select a media article or case study and write a report.
• Undertake further research about your chosen case and the ethical issues involved, to assist you in analysing and discussing it in your report.
• Analyse the ethical issues applying the classical ethical theories, including utilitarianism, deontology, contract, and virtue. Your report should present well reasoned arguments, logically leading to appropriate recommendations.
• You should not introduce new arguments in your report that were not contained in your argument visualisation, and your report should contain all of the arguments contained in your visualisation.
• Write an overall conclusion that justifies your recommendations made in your report.

Answer

Introduction
This report on ethics assignment is focused on a specific article with title “Programmers need ethics when designing the technologies that influence people’s lives” to discuss its ethical issues, assessment of the Issues, and critical implications from Australian Computer Society (ACS) Code of Ethics guidelines. The sections are prepared to provide a brief discussion of the article content, ethical issues identified, assessment of their implications, evaluation of the solutions, ethical theories application, and analysis.

Background of the Article Agenda
The ICT professionals are involved in the development of new technologies and its gradual upgrade according to human lifestyle worldwide. They are responsible for finding suitable improvements in the technologies as well as protection from data theft, security breach and hackers’ exploits. The computer scientists can only understand the system and only they can set appropriate restrictions, policies, and protective measures to the technologies that can help with the future of private and sensitive data online(Ruotsalainen&Blobel, 2019). The author of the article proposed a new code of ethics for ICT professionals to adhere as consideration to ethics could share responsibility and invoke suitable guidelines for safety(Pancake, 2018). In near future, the world is progressing towards data-driven scenarios where sensor data to daily activities information would be essential to conduct machine learning and autonomous developments.

Prior code of ethics issued from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was adopted in 1992 when computation work was entirely based on technical workers where the growth of computation was basic and without complications related to violations (Thornleyet al., 2018). In today’s viewpoint, technology can influence peoples’ lives as well as connected with unpredictable ethical violations. Hence, current Code of Ethics of ACM introduced the aspects that can clearly demonstrate influence of technologies in daily life and importance of ethical violations to promote public benefits.

Identification of Ethical Issues related to the Agenda
The article has portrayed an agenda of ethical violations and there is a significant lacking in existing ACM Code of Ethics. Therefore, the author proposed some major changes to be introduced to deal with certain ethical issues in the ICT field. Some applicable ethical issues are identified as per article agenda that are mentioned as follows;

Privacy as an Ethical Issue: The public data in social media or from cloud-shared platform has a significant amount of privacy ethics violations. The personal data organizations collect through their application interface, from search engines, social media; are major exploit sources for hackers (Ruotsalainen&Blobel, 2020). A customer or consumer often possess a right to decide whether they want their data to be used in a specific manner and due to privacy violation issues, the people should strictly assert to the law for their safety. As per recent trends in technological developments, devices interconnected in an architecture collects sensitive information from users such as buying habits, visitation frequency, app usage patterns, and even their health data is recorded from smart devices (Wigan, 2020). Hackers often targets to collect such data to profile users and plan significant attacks based on such data. Therefore, organizations collecting such massive amount of sensitive data are in major concern of privacy ethics violation.

Security as an Ethical Issue: The data security of customer and user should always ensure certain protocols that can protect their data from malicious attackers. Similar to privacy issue, the article presents a scenario where, user data can pose a major threat to security for users(Pancake, 2018). The security breach can exploit users in financial thefts and private data usage; such as stealing money from users’ bank accounts, spamming their personal email to gain access of their medical information, health data, gaining access to their devices, exploiting password, and eavesdropping private conversation. Therefore, the organizations would be held responsible for security loopholes and existing limitations in their security.

Cyber-crimeas an Ethical Issue: Ethical Hackers who are often recruited by some companies for collecting data showing hacks that can publish the issues exist in the system. However, the issue in the system can be disclosed to the other competitors can they can employ their hackers to gain access to other users’ data (Loke& Matthews, 2020). Therefore, some hackers often break into proprietary systems and steals relevant information, creating copy websites with parody features, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, and even manipulating users to gain monetary benefits of the hackers. Organizations employing ethical hackers can often termed as culprit to the system on ethical grounds.

Regulation on the internet as an Ethical Issue: Regulation on the internet refers to conveying permission on the user data or collected resources from organization. For instance, unauthorized access to resource is not permitted, destroying information integrity is a violation, publishing defamatory materials, conflicting organizational practices with misinterpretation, and violating organizational rights(Warren et al., 2020; Pancake, 2018). Therefore, the organization having significant weaknesses to handle such violations is considered as guilty on ‘Regulation on the internet ethical issue’ grounds.

Assessment of Ethical Problems Implications
The Ethical Norms are included in this section to provide an assessment of the ethical problems identified as per the central agenda of the article. The ethical norms are mentioned to prepare proper guidelines for addressing the ethical issues. The norms are mentioned as; Truth: The Truth in ICT platform and in data rights is considered as a dual ethical application where it can serve information accuracy and it guides ICT professionals to handle the private information appropriately (Kostoska&Kocarev, 2019). The truth is another aspect of ethical virtues to follow trustworthiness, openness, and honesty. The users preserve the rights of sharing their information to organization and the organization serves the right to keep the information privacy intact. Therefore, trusting the organization for ensuring privacy of their data, the user has to depend on truth norms (Cahlik, 2018). The organization should ensure integrity of the information, maintaining regulations to act for ensuring customers’ trustworthiness.

Freedom: The customer reserves a right to have their own freedom of making choices whether they should acquire freedom or privacy and freedom from intrusion. The organization cannot enforce the freedom rights of a user to collect their information (Ruotsalainen&Blobel, 2020). The choice of freedom norm cannot restrict security from intrusion attacks; the users can charge an organization for violation of their information sharing and security limitations.

Human rights: The human rights norm is directly dependent on freedom norm; however, the human rights norm is more closely applicable to the user as per the violation act. The human rights can protect an individual from unlawful intervention from society and organization and protect private life of the individual.

Critical Evaluation of the Solutions to Ethical Problems
Guryanova et al., (2020) opined that Ethical Problems can be resolved with practicing suitable ethical guidelines against the miscreants and violations. The business ethical violations can be resolved with dealing with ethical dilemma and obtaining a policy with regulations. However, the ICT ethical problems cannot be dealt with only employing policies in workplace (Basaran&Rukundo, 2018). The ethical issues in ICT relates to privacy and security violation, cybercrime issues, and internet regulation violations. Therefore, Seth (2019) claimed that to deal with ICT ethical problems, the organization requires to ensure ethical guidelines. The organizations require practicing autonomy and freedom of individual for keeping confidentiality of user data and preserving the private information. Chang (2021) suggested that client should be granted a major access to their personal and private information that is held in organizations’ possession. The client can have the opportunity of verifying the information accuracy and can choose whether to use their data in organizational purpose or not. Falak&Zaman (2020) identified that client should always have the right to claim access to their information at any point of time and they have the right to know what purpose the corresponding organization would use their data. This opportunity of knowing public information purpose, access rights, and giving rights for changing their information is a suitable act based on identified norms such as truth, freedom, and human rights.

Galhardo& De Souza (2020) also suggested that organization and ICT professionals are bound by human rights to inform the client about their intended purpose of information use to seek clients’ permission. There are several different methods for seeking client approval or permission; such as informed consent, signed contract, and information rights policy (Goosen, 2018). The organization should share their informed consent, signed contract or information rights policy to the client before collection of their information and using the information. The client has their rights to withdraw the contract or consent based on their interest and choice; the organization is bound by rights to delete client information once the withdrawal is obtained.

Application of Ethical Theories to the Problems
As per ethical theories of deontology, virtue, contract, and utilitarianism; this agenda focuses on the act of privacy, security, and violation to internet regulation identifies ethical requirements in ACM standard. Therefore, it is best suited with Deontological grounds where the act of privacy, security, and exploit concern (morality of human actions) is directly related to ICT professionals’ intervention (duty) and vice versa (Galhardo& De Souza, 2020). The ICT professionals can change these concerns as per the threats emerging in recent data-centric approach of computation. The need of ethical norm and concept change in existing ACM can be defined in utilitarianism views as the changes in ethical aspects of ACM can promote peoples’ trust and happiness to organizational services (Chang, 2021). Therefore, the organization should promote virtue of securing public data at their possession and the organization requires ensuring public safety (Ba?aran&Rukundo, 2018). In a deontological view, the organization duty of conveying the ethical guidelines can not only help the public data safety but also the organization can ensure changing their ethical policies to convey suitable guidelines.

Analysis of the Ethical Problems from ICT Professionals and ACS Viewpoint
In ethical ACS Code of Ethics, there are six principles that are adhered to ensure acting within the ethical law and promoting social values. The principles state that;
1. The public interest should be placed before considering business or organizational interest. Hence, in the article, the organizations that require public data and personal information from people should always prefer their interest on the same before their purpose of using them. The ethical ground of data collection and storing public information will only be allowed when the people behind the information are interested to share their data with the organization.

2. Organization and their work that influences the people should be focused in enhancing the quality of life. Therefore, according to the article, organizations should attempt to ensure using innovation to improve quality of life rather than putting their life into severe concerns of privacy, security, and internet regulation violation.

3. The organization should represent their skills, knowledge, service and products to promote their honesty. The people should be able to trust the honesty of the organization.

4. The organization or managing body should attempt to achieve competence for stakeholders. In this articles’ perspective, the ACM should change their ethics policy to ensure ICT professionals can follow them and ensure public good.

5. The organization should achieve professional development with their work and improve their colleagues and staffs as a result from the professional development. The article conveys to achieve ethics code modification to bring significant improvements as per scenario changed in modern world.

6. The integrity of society and respect for others should be increased with work and gradual development. The article author gives a beneficial aspect from the update in code of ethics of ACM that can enhance societal values and public data values.

Conclusion
The report comes to a conclusion showing that the agenda from the article is solely dependent on the managing organization for achieving ethical integrity and societal values. Based on the ethical problems, moral and individual consent can be useful before collecting public and ensuring its confidentiality. The organization responsible for data collection and use should be rightful owner for securing the data in their possessions. Moreover, the author in article conveys a positive change to existing ACM Code of Ethics guidelines to support technological advancements and more exposure to ethical violations.

References
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Galhardo, J. A. G., & De Souza, C. A. (2020). ICT Regulation Process: Habermas Meets the Multiple Streams Framework. Goosen, L. (2018). Ethical information and communication technologies for development solutions: research integrity for massive open online courses. In Ensuring Research Integrity and the Ethical Management of Data (pp. 155-173). IGI Global.

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Loke, L., & Matthews, B. (2020). Scaffolding of Interaction Design Education Towards Ethical Design Thinking. In Design Thinking in Higher Education (pp. 165-181).Springer, Singapore.

Pancake, C. (2018). Programmers need ethics when designing the technologies that influence people's lives. The Conversation.Retrieved 10 May 2021, from https://theconversation.com/programmers-need-ethics-when-designing-the-technologies-that-influence-peoples-lives-100802.

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