AUTHOR
Frances S. Grodzinsky

ABSTRACT

It has been a decade since Computer Ethics came into prominence within the field of computer science and engineering, changing not only the profession but the classroom as well. The commercialization and globalization of the World Wide Web has impacted us all, both producers and consumers alike. What was once the province of the few has become the virtual society of the multitudes. Ethical issues concerning security, privacy, information, identity, community and equity of access once contained and localized, have assumed additional complexity in the global environment. Every day, the front pages of our newspapers and magazines report violations of one sort or another.

This paper will address two questions: As we move into the 21st century, are we shaping ‘ethical’ information communication technology (ICT) professionals? Is our vision of an ‘ethical’ global on-line society a realistic one?

Part One will examine the education of ‘ethical’ ICT professionals who will be instrumental in the integration of computer technology into 21st century society. It will also focus on the changing role of the professor of computer ethics and the usefulness of ethical codes. Part Two will focus on the vision of an ethical on-line society. It will ask whether a moral dialogue can take place concerning the structure and policies of on-line society and reflect on how computer professionals, those of us creating technology, need to define and communicate our mission vis-a-vis humankind. If we focus only on normative models, we will be sacrificing the hope of a ‘good’ society for merely a civil one. I fear that without moral dialogue, we will lose all sense of shared community values.

AUTHOR
Don Gotterbarn

ABSTRACT

Software projects have ethical dimensions that need to be identified in order to minimize negative ethical issues and promote positive ethical values. A Software Development Impact Statement (SoDIS) can be used to help accomplish this task. This paper examines: the concept of a software development impact statement, the implementation of a decision support tool to aid in producing a SoDIS, the strengths and weaknesses of automating this process, including what was revealed about different ethical decision models, and the effectiveness

The problem:

The development, delivery, and use of computing artifacts have significant ethical, professional, and societal consequences. Although the negative consequences of deploying software have been documented, the occurrence of such consequences has, mistakenly, been treated as haphazard. The recognizable causes for many of these consequences actually originate in the software management and development process. There is a need to proactively identify these root causes and to develop an ethical decision support model whose use will increase the probability of the positive affects and decrease the probability of the negative affects. The positive and negative ethical impacts of software will continue until their underlying causes are understood and an ethical decision support tool is developed and dispersed.

Solution background:

Simon Rogerson and I developed the concept of a Software Development Impact Statement (SoDIS) as a model which can be used to identify the ethical dimensions of a software development project and to identify ways to mediate the potential negative consequence of that project. (Rogerson & Gotterbarn)

Shneiderman (1990) introduced the concept of a social impact statements to bring public participation into technology design. Huff and Jawer (1994) narrowed the application of this concept to participatory design in software development. Rogerson and Gotterbarn have developed the concept of a Software Development Impact Statement which can be effectively used to focus attention on the ethical issues associated with each stage of the software development process.

Like an environmental impact statement, the most significant aspects of the software development impact statement is the process of developing the statement and what is discovered in developing the final statement. The software development impact statement is both a process and a product. The SoDIS uses a stakeholder analysis model to address the ethical dimensions of a project. Once stakeholders are identified, a developer needs to examine both the stakeholder\x{FFFD}s rights and the developers obligations to the stakeholder. The logical feasibility of this approach was tested with positive results in Gotterbarn=s classes in the U.S.

With the support of a National Science Foundation Grant work continued on the examination of the SoDIS principles and the development of a decision support tool. Results thus far include: the development of a formalized structure of the model which facilitates identification of negative ethical issues, and the development and testing of a working prototype which implements many of the features of the original SoDIS model.

The goal of the SoDIS process is to identify significant ways in which the completion of individual software development tasks may negatively affect stakeholders and to identify additional project tasks needed to prevent any anticipated problems. The SoDIS process uses a review of the software project plan to detect any potential social, professional, or ethical issues, concerns, or consequences related to the project.

The SoDIS process consists of four basic steps: (1) the identification of the immediate and extended stakeholders in a project, (2) the identification of the tasks or work breakdown packages in a target project, (3) for every task, the identification and recording of potential ethical issues violated by the completion of that task for each stakeholder, and (4) the recording of the details and solutions of significant ethical issues which may be related to individual tasks and an examination of whether the current task needs to be modified or a new task created in order to address the identified concern.

The SoDIS analysis process helps identify every task where there is a potential ethical issue compromised for some stakeholder caused by the completion of that task. For each stakeholder identified, a SoDIS analysis is completed for each project task. The SoDIS analysis is built around a questionnaire that considers five ethical principles which should be applied to every project.

The paper and tool demonstration will evaluate the ethical decision model used in the tool, discuss the limitations and strengths of automating an ethical decision making process, and how to provide guidance for those who need to evaluate ethical arguments. The development and use of a process and tool like this is required if software developers are regularly to create ethically sensitive software.

AUTHOR
Wendy J Gordon and Paul J. Liacos

ABSTRACT

My topic is structural: identifying what is at stake in utilizing various U.S. legal tools to shelter the public from the restraints on creative use imposed by contracts and by technology.

The United States Constitution provides that federal law is “supreme” over state law. This provides potential for moderating the power of media providers who have been taking advantage of the Net and other new technologies to control the public’s use of intellectual products by means of state contract law. Federal copyright law includes provisions to limit the duration of private ownership, and to place ideas and facts in the public domain. These and similar federal guarantees for the public domain may pre-empt state contract law that purports to validate contracts that impose perpetual protection or contracts that try to restrain the copying of ideas and facts. However, to use pre-emption, one must fairly face the public/private distinction, and the taxonomic issue of how contract and property differ.

Technological modes of control, such as encryption, not only raise these issues, but also pose an additional conundrum: when should governmental power be enlisted to control self-help. On the latter issue, one useful model might be the antitrust laws (which prohibit many kinds of ‘self-help’ by potential monopolists and price fixers). Another useful source of analogy is the rich state and federal range of prohibition on trading in non-commidifiable resources.

AUTHOR
David H. Gleason

ABSTRACT

This paper expands the author’s earlier work on subsumption ethics by elaborating on the axioms presented at the Tangled Web conference at Dartmouth in August of 1998, and the paper “Subsumption Ethics” published in Computers and Society, March 1999. The paper first describes the principle of subsumption ethics, then discusses its four axioms in detail. It concludes with a discussion of the application of the axioms to practical IT problems within the context of various ethical frameworks.

Subsumption ethics is the process by which decisions become incorporated into the operation of information technology (IT) systems, and subsequently forgotten. IT systems, by nature, repeat operations over and over. If those operations have unethical impacts, the system will continue to execute them anyway. Unlike a human operator, there is no point in the cycle where the machine pauses to ask, “Should I do this?” Subsumption in general is the process of building larger components from smaller ones. In this sense, a cell subsumes DNA function, American common law subsumes judicial decisions, and a hairdryer subsumes an electric motor. Subsumption in computers is different because there is so much more of it going on than in simple machines.

In computer systems, small components are developed and tested, and once they are working reliably they are subsumed into larger systems. This is the enabling technique of object oriented programming. The larger systems, in turn, are subsumed into still larger systems. Once components, subsystems and applications are operating, the subsumed process becomes invisible and unavailable to the user, what James Moor calls the “invisibility factor.”

Systems seem like they should be extremely malleable. People tend to think that changes to software should be easy because programming is just a set of instructions, and not like a building made up of hard materials. However, the principle of subsumption makes it clear that changing base components is like moving building foundations, and can require changes to entire systems. The year 2000 problem, for example, is a result of subsumed date processing. There are thousands of layers of subsumption in a typical computer system. There are four axioms of subsumption ethics:

1. Information systems subsume design, policy and implementation decisions in programming code and content. Code segments and content become “subsumed objects.” While it is demonstrable that systems are built from subsumed components, it is less easy to show exactly how decisions are subsumed. This axiom posits that the decisions themselves, including many subtle factors, are incorporated into systems operation.
2. Subsumed objects have determinate moral value. Anecdotally, we can see the moral value of subsumed objects. A windowing system that can only display certain colors, thereby excluding users with certain visual disabilities, has a negative moral value for those users.
3. Subsumed objects have a high “invisibility factor.” Subsumed objects are invisible to most users. It is not possible, for example, to know all the calculations that mortgage eligibility software might use without seeing the source code. Such software could systematically discriminate without a user’s knowledge.
4. Subsumptive complexity increases over time. As systems are developed, components become subsumed more and more deeply. For example, purchasers of automated toll booth data subsume it into much larger databases, which might incorporate home ownership, family and estimated income information. These axioms can be applied to practical problems in IT by using them in conjunction with established ethical frameworks. A series of imperatives for IT development can be constructed from a matrix that combines the axioms with a code of ethics. The paper describes this process in detail.

Since the axioms are not dependant on a specific ethical framework, they can be applied in many situations, across cultural as well as industrial boundaries. This process offers developers a powerful tool to use to enhance project management and facilitate software impact analysis.

AUTHOR
Anthony E. Fusco

ABSTRACT

I have been gathering information related to teaching children about the internet and would like to present my ideas at ETHICOMP 99. The goal is to express my views on this topic to the ETHICOMP audience in hopes of gaining valuable ideas to enrich my research and continue to move forward. The conference would be an ideal place to present this topic to educators from all over the world. I hope to gain valuable information based on their teaching practices, experiences, and ideas.

In a school near my hometown, I volunteered in a program to teach first-graders about families and human values. I also tried to explain to them how theses values play a role in the use of a computer. This experience taught me that first-graders may be too young to understand what computers are all about, but if they can develop a clear set of values early in their lives, they will be able to apply them to all aspects of life, including computers.

We need to provide to children an understanding of what people can do with a computer as well as what they shouldn’t do. They need to understand early that it is not right to steal others’ programs, or to cause harm to others by the use of a computer. They have to be made aware of the consequences of using computers for harm. Children’s minds are like sponges that absorb huge amounts of information from home, from friends, in school, on television. They need some form of education regarding the role of computers and the effects they have on society. What methods are available to do this? How does one begin to develop a strategy to discuss this topic in a way that is taken seriously?

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 was developed in the USA to protect information from and about children. In addition, there are various groups on the internet that help provide information to parents and children on the “do’s” and “don’ts” of the internet. Software programs have been created to block out unwanted sites as well as filter emails, but these programs don’t work unless they are used. Web sites pertaining to the protection of children are great, but they too are useless unless they are visited. Awareness is the key–and maybe the first step to getting the word out to teachers, parents and children about the ethical issues related to computers and the affects they have on society.

My goal at ETHICOMP99 will be to present my ideas and plans and then gather a wealth of suggestions from the many experts in computer ethics who will attend. I hope to find out first hand what is happening in other countries, and how similar issues are addressed there. Once I have gathered enough information, I then want to prepare a children’s workshop and a packet of information that could be handed out to students — a packet that addresses privacy, security, and other issues related to computers. This packet would also include class exercises that teachers could use in the classroom to help students recognize and differentiate the good from the bad.

I believe that the topic of my paper would be a valuable contribution to ETHICOMP99. It deals with a part of society that is growing and evolving very rapidly. The use of computers by children in the present will lead to the use of computers by adults in the future. Teaching children the proper computer use early can build a solid foundation for their future and for the future of computer ethics.

AUTHOR
Thomas J. Froehlich

ABSTRACT

A technology is not morally neutral. It embodies a set of values, a framework and an ideology. Technologies include intellectual technologies, such as catalogs and indexes, and software technologies, such as search engines, metasearchers and subject directories or indexes on the Internet. Search engines have intrinsic properties that make them inherently and irredeemably flawed, because they attempt to infer intellectual properties, such as the meaningful content of a web site, from physical properties. Search engines rely primarily on query term location and query term frequency, sometimes boosted by other computable factors, such as link popularity. It is true that there may be some correlation between physical properties and intellectual properties. For example, the occurrence of a query term in the title of a document or web page often does mean that the document is about that term, at least in part or for the most part, and that the term is important; similarly, term frequency may be an indicator about the relative importance of that term in a particular web page and thereby about the relative importance of that web site with respect to that term as a query term. But this correlation is a weak one and certainly not directly causal: for example, any term in a title or URL of a web site does not mean the article is about that term. Consider the web site entitled and URLed as “web pages that suck” which is hardly about the value of breast feeding. The attempt to reduce intellectual properties to physical properties is just another version of a longstanding idiocy of making the problem fit the technology rather than the reverse: search engine software developers make the information-seeking problem fit the technology rather than making technology fit the problem, acknowledging the inherent weaknesses of the technology. This is because of the nature of computers: they can count and determine location (as long as the location is easily identifiable, e.g., a title field in an HTML tag), but they cannot determine meaningful connections, at least not at the moment and not in the foreseeable future. So too is it with metasearchers and subject directories.

What is problematic about these tools is that they are offered as if they were legitimate intellectual technologies: they rarely, if at all, explain their limitations, drawbacks, purview (what section of the Internet they cover), or means of ranking the output. Social responsibility insists that, like information professionals, they should promote, to the extent possible, informed consent. But economic motives mitigate against admissions of the flawed nature of each engine or subject directories or the possibility of informed consent. To the extent that search engines and subject directories pretend to be authoritative and have intellectual substance and do not promote informed consent, they can be regarded as unethical. Furthermore, they embrace, sustain and perpetuate an ideology: the domination culture by technology, which in turn is driven by the domination of economics in cultural, social and political life. This drive has led to attempts to make commodities of all intellectual work, to demean public interest and free access to information, and to turn the Internet into a giant shopping mall. Such an ideology has fostered a rampant consumerism, and deployed capitalism without conscience around the world as the new theology. Capitalism without conscience means that profits and jobs overshadow all other kinds of concerns: public interest, environmentalism, and other forms of social responsibility.