It probably goes without saying that the security and ethical issues raised by the information age, and specifically the internet, are the most significant in decades. It will be many years and many court cases before socially acceptable policies and best practices are in place.
Scenario: You are a 25 year old, drive a Honda, like country music, shop at walmart at least once a month around the 15th, wear a size 8 dress, like eating at Sonic, and spend lots of time on facebook chatting with other females your age. Would it surprise you to know that this information can be taken from various computer records?
A lot of personal information about us has always been available, just not as easily and as readily as today. Commercial company and government databases now allow profiling like in the scenario above to be done easier and faster than before.
New information technology raises new ethical, social and political issues that must be dealt with on individual, social, and political levels. These issues have five moral dimensions: information rights and obligations, property rights and obligations, system quality, quality of life, and accountability and control.
Technology can take information about people and find vague, non-obvious relationships. It might discover, for example, that an applicant for a job as a non-profit organization shares a telephone number with a known criminal and alerts the hiring manager.
Technological trends are posing new situations and questions we haven’t had to deal with before. Because it’s our world and our future, we should be concerned and prepared to resolve.
How do we solve some of the real world ethical dilemmas? Should companies be allowed to read employee’s personal emails? Should emails be used against a person or company in a court of law? Is it okay to run a personal website from your workplace computer? Should companies use technology to monitor your keystrokes to determine how much work you are doing?
Bottom Line: Ethics in an information society holds each person responsible for his or her actions. Each person is accountable for everything he or she does and liable for the consequences their actions may impose on other people and society.
Companies can no longer ignore the necessity of establishing rules for technology use. The issue won’t go away and will continue to grow. If you work for a company that does not have a policy, get busy and suggest one for everybody…..it’s the right thing to do!
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