Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age

The major ethical, social, and political issues that information systems raise include the following moral dimensions. Information rights and obligations What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect? Property rights and obligations How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society in which

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Key Technology Trends that Raise Ethical Issues

Ethical issues long preceded information technology. Nevertheless, information technology has heightened ethical concerns, taxed existing social arrangements, and made some laws obsolete or severely crippled. Five key t echnological trends are responsible for these ethical stresses, summarized in Table 4.2. The doubling of computing power every 18 months has made it possible for most

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Basic Concepts of Ethical Decisions: Responsibility, Accountability, and Liability

Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals who are responsible for the consequences of their actions. Responsibility is a key element of ethical action. Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for the decisions you make. Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions; it means that mechanisms are

Ethical Analysis

When confronted with a situation that seems to present ethical issues, how should you analyze it? The following five-step process should help: Identify and describe the facts clearly Find out who did what to whom and where, when, and how. In many instances, you will be surprised at the er­rors in the initially reported

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Candidate Ethical Principles

Once your analysis is complete, what ethical principles or rules should you use to make a decision? What higher-order values should inform your judgment? Although you are the only one who can decide which among many ethical prin­ciples you will follow, and how you will prioritize them, it is helpful to consider some ethical

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Professional Codes of Conduct

When groups of people claim to be professionals, they take on special rights and obligations because of their special claims to knowledge, wisdom, and respect. Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by associations of professionals such as the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Bar Association (ABA), the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP),

Some Real-World Ethical Dilemmas

Information systems have created new ethical dilemmas in which one set of interests is pitted against another. For example, many companies use voice recognition software to reduce the size of their customer support staff by en­abling computers to recognize a customer’s responses to a series of computer­ized questions. Many companies monitor what their employees

Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom in the Internet Age

Privacy is the claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or in­terference from other individuals or organizations, including the state. Claims to privacy are also involved at the workplace. Millions of employees are sub­ject to digital and other forms of high-tech surveillance. Information technology and systems threaten individual claims to privacy

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Property Rights: Intellectual Property in the Internet Age

Contemporary information systems have severely challenged existing laws and social practices that protect intellectual property. Intellectual property is de­fined as tangible and intangible products of the mind created by individuals or corporations. Information technology has made it difficult to protect intellec­tual property because computerized information can be so easily copied or dis­tributed on networks.

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Computer-Related Liability Problems

In late 2013 hackers obtained credit card, debit card, and additional personal infor­mation about 70 to 110 million customers of Target, one of the largest U.S. retail­ers. Target’s sales and reputation took an immediate hit from which it has still not completely recovered. Target says it has spent over $60 million to strengthen its

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System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors

White Christmas turned into a blackout for millions of Netflix customers and social network users on December 24, 2012. The blackout was caused by the failure of Amazon’s cloud computing service (AWS), which provides storage and computing power for many websites and services, including Netflix. The loss of service lasted for a day. Amazon

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Quality of Life: Equity, Access, and Boundaries

The negative social costs of introducing information technologies and systems are beginning to mount along with the power of the technology. Many of these negative social consequences are not violations of individual rights or property crimes. Nevertheless, they can be extremely harmful to individuals, societies, and political institutions. Computers and information technologies potentially can

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Will Automation Kill Jobs?

Dennis Kriebal of Youngstown, Ohio, had been a su­pervisor at an aluminum extrusion factory, where he punched out parts for cars and tractors. Six years ago, he lost his job to a robot, and since then has been doing odd jobs to keep afloat. Sherry Johnson used to work for the local newspaper in

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Health Risks: RSI, CVS, and Cognitive Decline

A common occupational disease today is repetitive stress injury (RSI). RSI occurs when muscle groups are forced through repetitive actions often with high-impact loads (such as tennis) or tens of thousands of repetitions under low-impact loads (such as working at a computer keyboard). The incidence of RSI is estimated to affect as much as

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How Harmful Are Smartphones?

For many of us, smartphones have become indispens­able, but they have also come under fire for their impact on the way we think and behave, especially among children. Two of the largest investors in Apple Inc. are urging the iPhone maker to take action against smartphone addiction among children over growing concerns about the

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Facebook Privacy: Your Life for Sale

Facebook describes its corporate mission as giv­ing people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. In 2017 and 2018 these lofty objectives took a serious blow when it became known that Facebook had lost control of the personal information users share on the site. Facebook had allowed its platform to

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Defining IT Infrastructure

An IT infrastructure consists of a set of physical devices and software applica­tions that are required to operate the entire enterprise. But IT infrastructure also includes a set of firmwide services budgeted by management and com­posed of both human and technical capabilities. These services include the following: Computing platforms used to provide computing services

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Evolution of IT Infrastructure

The IT infrastructure in organizations today is an outgrowth of more than 50 years of evolution in computing platforms. There have been five stages in this evolution, each representing a different configuration of comput­ing power and infrastructure elements (see Figure 5.2). The five eras are general-purpose mainframe and minicomputer computing, personal com­puters, client/server networks,

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Technology Drivers of Infrastructure Evolution

The changes in IT infrastructure we have just described have resulted from developments in computer processing, memory chips, storage devices, net­working hardware and software, and software design that have exponentially increased computing power while exponentially reducing costs. Let’s look at the most important developments. 1. Moore’s Law and Microprocessing Power In 1965, Gordon Moore,

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What are the components of IT infrastructure?

IT infrastructure today is composed of seven major components. Figure 5.8 illustrates these infrastructure components and the major vendors within each component category. These components constitute investments that must be coordinated with one another to provide the firm with a coherent infrastructure. In the past, technology vendors supplying these components offered pur­chasing firms a

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