AUTHOR

Bernd Carsten Stahl and Dervla Collins (Ireland)

ABSTRACT

In this paper we want to present the findings of a study that researched the attitudes of Irish IS professionals with regards to employee surveillance and how codes of ethics can change their perceptions or actions. Moving in the triangle of privacy, surveillance, and codes of ethics, the study goes to the heart of some of the most intensively discussed topics in computer ethics, information ethics, and business ethics.

Privacy is probably – next to intellectual property – the ethical problem that computer professionals as well as IT managers have to deal with most frequently. At the same time it is also a serious intellectual and academic challenge. Views range from the famous classical definition by Warren / Brandeis as being part of the general right to be “let alone” to the modern discussion of whether privacy is an intrinsic or an instrumental right. Some authors don’t agree that it is a right at all and even those who do are uncertain what the limits of this right are. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that moral and legal norms sometimes contradict and that there is no international standard on dealing with privacy. European standards, for example, are much stricter than American ones, a fact which may come to threaten transatlantic trade.

Privacy issues in commercial organisations arise in two areas: Privacy of customer data and privacy of employees. Our study concentrates on the internal questions of privacy, especially on the problem of employee surveillance. On the subject of employee privacy one can find two extreme positions. One group of authors argues that whatever employees do during their work time is done at the cost and usually with the technology belonging to the employer. The employer pays the employee for that time and therefore has a right to all of the output of the employee. The consequence is that the employer has the right to know and check everything that the employee does at work. This position can be characterised as “complete surveillance”. On the other hand there are those who say that the employer may have the right to the employee’s output, but he has no right to the data concerning the employee other than what is immediately related to the output. All information about the employee is then considered to be completely within the discretionary rights of the employee. Between these two extreme positions, all other combinations are conceivable.

Our question now is: how can the ordinary IT professional deal with these positions? They are frequently forced to make pertinent decisions because these are part of their jobs. The rapid growth and deployment of surveillance technologies by organisations threatens to make information and employee privacy obsolete. The current range of technologies specifically designed to survey ranges from phone tapping, Internet tracking, email monitoring to closed circuit TV. Thanks to these technological innovations the private sector now enjoys unprecedented abilities to collect personal data, and it is suggested that the costs of data collection and surveillance will decrease, while the quantity and quality of data will increase. As the responsibility for purchasing, developing, installing, collating, storing and reviewing the information generated from such surveillance tools falls on the shoulders of the IT/IS Department, ethical and moral demands are placed on IS/IT professionals they might never have envisaged and are ill equipped to deal with.

One possible solution to the problem that one finds frequently in literature about applied ethics is the introduction of codes of ethics or codes of conducts. Those codes, however, are themselves highly contentious. What is their purpose? Can they tell people what to do, should they just awaken consciousness of the problem, can they circumvent the legal loopholes or are they a contradiction in terms, because ethics cannot be codified?

We decided that one important aspect in answering all of these questions was to know more about the actual realities of the use of such codes. For that purpose we conducted a survey among 60 IS / IT professionals in Ireland which should tell us what the practices in surveillance was as well as what influence codes of conduct had on these practices. The survey, which we will present in detail in the finished paper, revealed several interesting discrepancies. It turned out that 55% of the companies used electronic methods of surveillance of their employees. The perception of this as unethical varied significantly. Depending on the mode of surveillance, the IS professionals often thought the surveillance acceptable. At the same time most considered themselves ethical and would refuse to do tasks for the company that they saw as unethical.

The interesting part of the survey was contrasting this possible ethical problem of surveillance with the realities of codes of conduct. Only 27% of the respondents stated that their organisation had a code of conduct and of those 50% were familiar with its content. Similar numbers apply to specific codes of conduct for IS professionals. Of those respondents who worked in companies that had codes of conduct 47% stated that they thought the code helpful when dealing with ethical problems. An almost equal percentage of the respondents who did not have a code also thought it would be helpful in dealing with ethical problems.

There are several conclusions one can draw from this: First, electronic surveillance is a reality in Ireland. Second, it is done by IS professionals, who in many cases see it as an ethical problem but are unsure how to deal with it. Third, codes of conduct are accepted by people making ethical decisions as a means for dealing with the ethical content of these decisions. The study clearly shows the relevance of codes of ethics for theory and practice.

At the same time, several questions for subsequent research became clear:

1. If IS professionals see codes as helpful, how exactly do codes help in concrete decision situations?
2. On what grounds do IS professionals decide if an action is immoral? Does the practice in a company affect the professionals’ ethical judgement?
3. Do any of these findings allow a feedback to the theoretical evaluations of privacy, surveillance, and codes of ethics? We hope that our presentation of the study and the discussion will help us define this future research more clearly.

AUTHOR

Barbara Begier

ABSTRACT

A task to improve software quality is addressed to software suppliers by international quality standards. Quality characteristics of software have been considered so far in a narrow range, just from a producers point of view. An increasing role of IT products requires to take into considerations also social and public interest at first to define quality objectives, then to build-in them into a product in the software process and at last to evaluate and assess if the product satisfies the specified quality requirements. A proposal is introduced how to extend applying of prevailed quality standards to regard public interest.

AUTHOR

J. Barrie Thompson (UK)

ABSTRACT

The call for papers for the conference highlights the fact that information and communication technologies (ICT) can have profound social consequences and that they have caused many organisations to change both their internal operations and the global reach of their activities. This “Transformation of Organisations in the Information Age” has not been restricted simply to commercial businesses. Organisations throughout the public, private and governmental sectors have all experienced enormous changes due to ICT. In particular, during recent years, these changes have been driven by new pressures that are due to the opportunities and facilities offered by the Internet. Universities are one type of organisation that has experienced enormous changes. ICT has resulted in radically changed learning and teaching approaches, the World Wide Web offers an almost boundless information resource, and students are no longer constrained by physical limitations on attendance. With developments in distance education and in the functions and facilities which can be supported online Universities can now operate well outside their previous physical boundaries. No longer are they the ivory-towered insular bastions of learning but organisations that must survive in a global market place with a world-wide audience.

The sources and volume of information readily available to staff, researchers, and students today is far beyond the imagination of researchers of a mere twenty years ago (a time when I undertook academic research in the area of solid state physics). No longer is information held in the dusty recesses of libraries guarded by the academic librarians. It is instantly on hand via the Internet and on-line databases. More importantly, such resources are not seen as just the domain of researchers but of all students within an institution. Perhaps over the last decade, one clear development we have seen in learning approaches is a greater and greater expectation that undergraduates, as they progress through the stages of their degree programs, will be able to undertake tasks at higher intellectual levels relying more and more on academic resources, and that postgraduate students on master’s level programmes will be able to evaluate critically evaluate current research and advanced scholarship [1]. However, the range and volume of information resources that are now so easily available has a major downside. This is that it has exacerbated the age-old academic problem of plagiarism. The means to “take” or “lift” information or text is a simple “Click. Cut and Paste” away. In addition, there is the problem of World Wide Web sites that will sell existing student reports or even produce new ones to order. The purpose of such sites is quite clear – it is simply to help students cheat.

At the University of Sunderland in the UK we offer a range of taught masters programmes in computing. Within each of these programmes we include a compulsory research skills module entitled “Research, Ethical, Professional and Legal Issues” (REPLI) an outline of which is appended to this abstract. The aim of the module is “to provide the students with an ability to undertake postgraduate level research and an appreciation of relevant ethical, professional and legal issues”. Essentially the ethical, professional and legal issues provide a research domain but the overall purpose is to ensure that the students gain research skills that will support them in the rest of their programme, in their future careers, and that they will undertake their research activities in an ethical and professional manner. Most importantly we wish to ensure that they are aware of issues associated with cheating (including plagiarism) and the means that are to available to prevent/detect such cheating.

The final paper for ETHICOMP 2002 will review the problems outlined above and will detail the approaches that we have adopted within the REPLI module to address them. Individual sections of the paper will detail:

• The philosophy behind the module, overall learning and teaching approach, and our approach to assessment.
• The range of information sources available to the students.
• Our use of “How to cheat” and “How to get caught” lecture sessions
• The use of World Wide Web tools in the detection of plagiarism (such as Turnitin [2])
• Our use of peer group reviewing processes to deter and detect plagiarism

Finally the paper will present an evaluation of our approach and details of how we plan to progress matters in the future.

REFERENCES

The framework for higher education qualifications in England Wales and Northern Ireland, Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, United Kingdom, available from www.qaa.ac.uk

Turnitin from: www.turnitin.com

AUTHOR

Andrzej Kocikowski

ABSTRACT

Based on chosen aspects of the idea of software subscription as well as the Microsoft Corporation’s .NET project, the author attempts to show that monopolistic actions on the software market cause conditions for an assumption of total control over the global ICT infrastructure, which may in the future threaten society with hypernomadization. This may in turn radically change relations between individuals and, e.g., the institution of state itself.

This text is a continuation of the task initiated by the paper The Discontinuity of Cultural Process in the Digital Civilization – Main Dangers. [Kocikowski, 2001]. This assignment focuses on a systematic display of the dark sides of the information revolution, particularly in regard to all that is connected with the lack of social control over the actions of corporate giants in the information branch.

AUTHOR

Jesús Díaz del Campo and Porfirio Barroso, (Spain)

ABSTRACT

In the information era, the power of the so-called ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) has greatly increased the responsibility of each citizen within the global society. Information professionals are not unaware of this fact. We have always defended the need to include humanistic courses, and, specifically, professional ethics and deontology, in the curricular content of future information specialists. In today’s world, with the challenge of globalization, in order for us to respond as individuals and as a society, that need has grown. The work of information professionals has an impact on all systems, whether social, economic or political. Thus, they must be conscious at all times of the implications of every type derived from their activities.

The aim of this paper is, first, to stress the fact that universities continue to be the setting for the preparation of the human resources that our society needs, and that this, and this alone, remains their basic task, despite their often having opted for a criteria of technical training with a very scarce humanistic component and lacking in social consciousness. Looking toward the future, it is difficult to imagine that the ethical problems derived from the use of the ICT are going to disappear or even diminish over the coming years. Thus, the new information professionals of the 21st century will have to continue to address all these questions, making the presence of professional ethics and deontology in their curriculum nearly indispensable.

Moreover, we consider the teaching method known as “saturate the curriculum” to be positive but insufficient. It may prove highly beneficial that students of the information sciences reflect on ethical dilemmas or situations that arise in the course of their more technical subjects. They would thus begin to familiarize themselves with these questions. However, if this is not backed up later on by the inclusion of a more specific course, their ethical training at the time of graduation will clearly be deficient. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, the instructor of this more technical course probably lacks the necessary philosophical background to be able to properly explain to his or her students how to make an ethical decision, on what criteria to base it or which theories are more suitable in each case. In fact, an inadequate explanation of all these questions could even be counterproductive. On the other hand, the explanation of isolated cases without including them in a more solid theory and, ideally, a complete course, with sufficient time to develop a subject matter that provides a minimum knowledge of the most important ethical issues, might create a greater confusion among the students with regard to these matters.

This brings us to another important question, whether or not it is appropriate to include a section dedicated to ethical theory in the course subject matter. Opinions concerning this point range from proposals to reduce the course to lessons on applied ethics, completely ignoring philosophical theory, to others supporting a program based on the ideas of the major philosophers, keeping the elements of informatics deontology to a minimum. We consider an intermediate pathway to be the best, dividing the program into two part to include both aspects, necessary, in our opinion, for the student of information engineering to achieve the proper ethical training. As would appear to be obvious, the only way to accomplish this goal is to offer a course devoted to this topic.

We analyze here the theory of one of the authors whose inclusion in our pedagogical proposal we consider most suitable because of the emphasis he has placed on the power of the ICT and on the responsibility derived from this circumstance for mankind. We refer to Hans Jonas who, in his work The principle of responsibility states, among other things, that wherever there is power, there is also responsibility. His affirmation is based on a reflection on the relationship between man and nature, a relationship that had not previously been considered in an ethical context. However, with the arrival on the scene of the ICT, nature, which we had exploited uncaringly until now, has been rendered fragile, vulnerable. This signifies that man himself is vulnerable. Therefore, our obligation is to conserve it; that is our responsibility, a responsibility that is indefinite. Given the material power conferred by the ICT on the individual even to destroy humanity, he must feel responsible not only for his own behavior and its most direct consequence, but for possible indirect and much more distant effects and consequences as well.

Thus, we consider Jonas’ work to be especially applicable for teaching a course on professional ethics and deontology within the framework of the present information era. After analyzing his theory, in the final section of our paper, we propose several ways of applying it to the course, especially with regard to case studies and the explanation of some of the topics that are most frequently included in the study program and in informatics deontological codes.

The ultimate objective is to establish a new approach, a new teaching model adapted to the present circumstances, and we think that Jonas offers an ideal one.

AUTHOR

Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (Israel)

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the nature of emotions in online relationships. It first compares some basic features of emotions in offline and online circumstances and then examines whether emotions in online relationships are similar to those in offline relationships or whether we are witnessing the emergence of new types of emotions.

In offline circumstances, emotions are typically generated by perceived significant changes, their focus of concern is personal and comparative and its typical object is a human being. Typical emotional characteristics are: instability, great intensity, partiality, and brief duration. Basic components are cognition, evaluation, motivation, and feelings. In addition to emotions, there are other affective phenomena, such as sentiments (enduring emotions), moods, affective disorders, and affective traits (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000).

Emotions in cyberspace in many aspects resemble those of offline circumstances. Emotions in cyberspace share similar features to offline emotions-although some of these features may be more or less noticeable online. Three such major features are change, instability, and the availability of an alternative.

Emotions typically occur when we perceive positive or negative significant changes in our personal situation, or in the situation of those related to us. A positive or negative significant change is one that significantly interrupts or improves a smoothly flowing situation relevant to our concerns. Like burglar alarms going off when an intruder appears, emotions signal that something needs attention. When no attention is needed, the signaling system can be switched off. We respond to the unusual by paying attention to it.

Cyberspace is full of changes and new opportunities-in this sense it is indeed an exciting place. The changes are of less personal significance since the available opportunities are not designed for a specific person and if you miss one opportunity, many others are still available. The presence of so many changes and the active role that imagination plays in online relationships can somewhat compensate for the normalization effect in which a change becomes normal and hence unexciting. The physical absence of the partner in online relationships, further removes certain constraints upon our imagination and the normalization effect is weaker.

Our psychological reality consists of both stable and unstable events. The successful combination of the two gives us both emotional excitement and a sense of calmness and security-both are crucial for a happy and healthy mental life. Cyberspace is more unstable, dynamic, and transitory than our real environment is. Thus we would expect to find that transitory emotions are more dominant while enduring affective attitudes are more rare. If in our regular everyday life we often look for changes in order to make our life more exciting, in cyberspace we often look for stability in order to facilitate calmer and enduring online relationships. The lack of stability in cyberspace often generates more intense and more transitory emotions. This is true of both positive emotions and negative emotions.

Emotions occur when a change is evaluated as relevant to our personal concerns. Emotions serve to monitor and safeguard our personal concerns; they give the eliciting event its significance. Emotional meaning is mainly comparative. The emotional environment contains not only what is and what will be experienced, but also all that could be or that one desires to be experienced. For the emotional system, all such possibilities are posited as simultaneously available and are compared to each other. The emotional meaning of online relationships is also comparative by nature: it relates, first of all, to our offline environment. The belief that cyberspace provides us with better alternatives is crucial in generating intense emotions. This may somewhat compensate for the less personal and practical nature of cyberspace.

The comparison underlying emotional significance encompasses the mental construction of the availability of an alternative situation. The more available the alternative-that is, the closer the imagined alternative is to reality-the more intense the emotion. Cyberspace does not merely significantly increase the availability of desired alternatives, but it is actually an alternative, available world, which runs parallel to the actual one. Sophisticated technology allows a rapid shift from one world to another. Cyberspace is becoming the next best thing to being there, and in some respects it is even better than the world we actually live in. In offline circumstances, we live in a real world and fantasize about virtual events that will improve the world; in cyberspace, we live in a virtual world and we attempt to incorporate in it more and more pieces of actual reality.

Emotions are functional and rational in many offline circumstances. Their functionality and rationality is less evident in cyberspace because of its novel nature and the fact that people have not yet learned how to cope with it. This may change as this medium evolves as we become more able to combine online with offline relationships.

Although emotions are largely spontaneous, they can be managed to some extent. This management is easier in cyberspace, as the imaginative aspect is more central in generating online emotions, and in many cases it is easier to manage our imagination-and thus our cognitive evaluation-than to change actual events.

The new kind of interpersonal relationships generated by online communication seems to have a profound impact upon our emotional experiences. Such relationships do not eliminate emotional experiences, but rather intensify them. So far, we have not observed the generation of new kinds of emotions, but this possibility should not be ruled out. It should be noted that the development of new types of emotions and the increase in the complexity of existing animal emotions has characterized our evolution from non-human animals to humans; nevertheless, in this evolutionary process none of the animal emotion ever completely disappeared. It is not clear yet whether online relationships will constitute such significant changes in our emotional life as to generate new types of emotions.

REFERENCES

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2000). The subtlety of emotions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.