In-class post, 06/11/2006

Well here we are once more, we started out with a little discussion about individual(s) who have been involved with personal bashing via these blogs, personally it doesn't bother me, as long as they are willing to take comments (and not have filtering on so they can reject it if it's not to their liking), so expect responses if you say anything (note that I wouldn't call names, you know who you are).

Anyway, on to today's topic, which is going to discuss Ethics in Information Technology.

Ethics concerns various issues within IT, such as:

1) Privacy - Some examples of privacy issues are:
(Quoted from www.windowsecurity.com)

• Should you read the private e-mail of your network users just “because you can?” Is it okay to read employees’ e-mail as a security measure, to ensure that sensitive company information isn’t being disclosed? Is it okay to read employees’ e-mail to ensure that company rules (for instance, against personal use of the e-mail system) aren’t being violated? If you do read employees’ e-mail, should you disclose that policy to them? Before or after the fact?
• Is it okay to monitor the Web sites visited by your network users? Should you routinely keep logs of visited sites? Is it negligent to not monitor such Internet usage, to prevent the possibility of pornography in the workplace that could create a hostile work environment?
• Is it okay to place key loggers on machines on the network to capture everything the user types? Screen capture programs so you can see everything that’s displayed? Should users be informed that they’re being watched in this way?
• Is it okay to read the documents and look at the graphics files that are stored on users’ computers or in their directories on the file server?

Other issues that may arise are with storing specific data, as well as selling data about a person e.g. customer information, credit card #, revealing people's information to the public etc.

Privacy ethics is one of the most subjective forms of I.T ethics, because a lot of issues tend to be double-edged, since there are a lot of grey areas with regards to certain situations.

2) Integrity - reliability of hardware/software products, e.g. selling/using products with known defects.

Well we're basically done for now, so we will continue tomorrow.

Laters.