CYBER ETHICS
Privacy
In the late 18th century, the invention of cameras spurred similar ethical debates as the internet does today. During a
Harvard Law Review seminal in 1890, Warren and Brandeis defined privacy from an ethical and moral point of view to be "central to dignity and individuality and personhood. Privacy is also indispensable to a sense of autonomy - to 'a feeling that there is an area of an individual's life that is totally under his or her control, an area that is free from outside intrusion.' The deprivation of privacy can even endanger a person's health." (Warren & Brandeis, 1890).
Over 100 years later, the internet and proliferation of private data through governments
and
ecommerce is a phenomenon which requires a new round of ethical debate involving a person's privacy.
Privacy can be decomposed to the limitation of others' access to an individual with "three elements of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude" (Gavison, 1984) Anonymity refers to the individual's right to protection from undesired attention. Solitude refers to the lack of physical proximity of an individual to others. Secrecy refers to the protection of personalized information from being freely distributed.
Individuals surrender private information when conducting transactions and registering for services. Ethical business practice protects the
privacy of their customers by securing information which may contribute to the loss of
secrecy,
anonymity, and
solitude. Credit card information, social security numbers, phone numbers, mothers' maiden names, addresses and phone numbers freely collected and shared over the internet may lead to a loss of Privacy.
Fraud and impersonation are some of the malicious activities that occur due to the direct or indirect abuse of private information.
Identity theft is rising rapidly due to the availability of private information in the internet. For instance, seven million Americans have fallen victim to identity theft in 2002, making it the fastest growing crime in the United States (Latak, 2005). Public records
search engines and
databases are the main culprits contributing to the rise of
cybercrime. Listed below are a few recommendations to restrict online databases from proliferating sensitive personnel information.
- Exclude sensitive unique identifiers from database records such as social security numbers, birth dates, hometown and mothers' maiden names.
- Exclude phone numbers that are normally unlisted.
- Clear provision of a method which allows people to have their names removed from a database.
- Banning the reverse social security number lookup services (Spinello, 2006).
Private Data Collection
Data warehouses are used today to collect and store huge amounts of personal data and consumer transactions. These facilities can preserve large volumes of consumer information for an indefinite amount of time. Some of the key architectures contributing to the erosion of privacy include databases, cookies and
spyware.
Some may argue that data warehouses are supposed to stand alone and be protected. However, the fact is enough personal information can be gathered from corporate websites and social networking sites to initiate a reverse lookup. Therefore, is it not important to address some of the ethical issues regarding how protected data ends up in the public domain?
As a result, identity theft protection businesses are on the rise. Companies such as
LifeLock and
JPMorgan Chase have begun to capitalize on selling identity theft protection insurance.
[edit] Property
Ethical debate has long included the concept of
property. This concept has created many clashes in the world of cyberethics. One philosophy of the internet is centered around the freedom of information. The controversy over ownership occurs when the property of information is infringed upon or uncertain.
Intellectual Property Rights
The ever-increasing speed of the internet and the emergence of compression technology, such as
mp3 opened the doors to
Peer-to-peer file sharing, a technology that allowed users to anonymously transfer files to each other, previously seen on programs such as
Napster or now seen through
communications protocol such as
BitTorrent. Much of this, however, was copyrighted music and
illegal to transfer to other users. Whether it is
ethical to transfer copyrighted media is another question.
Proponents of unrestricted file sharing point out how file sharing has given people broader and faster access to media, has increased exposure to new artists, and has reduced the costs of transferring media (including less environmental damage). Supporters of restrictions on file sharing argue that we must protect the income of our artists and other people who work to create our media. This argument is partially answered by pointing to the small proportion of money artists receive from the legitimate sale of media.
We also see a similar debate over intellectual property rights in respect to software ownership. The two opposing views are for closed source software distributed under restrictive
licenses or for free and
open source software (Freeman & Peace, 2004).
The argument can be made that restrictions are required because companies would not invest weeks and months in development if there is no incentive for revenue generated from sales and licensing fees. Proponents for
open source believe that all programs should be available to anyone who wants to study them.
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
With the introduction of
Digital Rights Management software, new issues are raised over whether the subverting of DRM is ethical. Some champion the hackers of DRM as defenders of users' rights, allowing the blind to make audio books of PDFs they receive, allowing people to burn music they have legitimately bought to CD or to transfer it to a new computer. Others see this as nothing but simply a violation of the rights of the intellectual property holders, opening the door to uncompensated use of copyrighted media.
Security
Security has long been a topic of ethical debate. Is it better to protect the common good of the community or rather should we safeguard the rights of the individual? There is a continual dispute over the boundaries between the two and which compromises are right to make. As an ever increasing amount of people connect to the internet and more and more personal data is available online there is susceptibility to
identity theft,
cyber crimes and
computer hacking. This also leads to the question of who has the right to regulate the internet in the interest of security?
Accuracy
Due to the ease of accessibility and sometimes collective nature of the internet we often come across issues of accuracy e.g. who is responsible for the authenticity and fidelity of the information available online? Ethically this includes debate over who should be allowed to contribute content and who should be held accountable if there are errors in the content or if it is false. This also brings up the question of how is the injured party, if any, to be made whole and under which
jurisdiction does the offense lay?
Accessibility, Censorship and Filtering
Accessibility, censorship and filtering bring up many ethical issues that have several branches in cyberethics. Many questions have arisen which continue to challenge our understanding of privacy, security and our participation in society. Throughout the centuries mechanisms have been constructed in the name of protection and security. Today the applications are in the form of software that filters domains and content so that they may not be easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention or on a personal and business level through free or
content-control software.
Internet censorship and filtering are used to control or suppress the publishing or accessing of information. The legal issues are similar to offline
censorship and filtering. The same arguments that apply to offline censorship and filtering apply to online censorship and filtering; whether people are better off with free access to information or should be protected from what is considered by a governing body as harmful, indecent or illicit. The fear of access by minors drives much of the concern and many online advocate groups have sprung up to raise awareness and of controlling the accessibility of minors to the internet.
Censorship and filtering occurs on small to large scales, whether it be a company restricting their employees' access to cyberspace by blocking certain websites which are deemed as relevant only to personal usage and therefore damaging to productivity or on a larger scale where a government creates large firewalls which censor and filter access to certain information available online frequently from outside their country to their citizens and anyone within their borders. One of the most famous examples of a country controlling access is the
Golden Shield Project, also referred to as the Great Firewall of China, a censorship and surveillance project set up and operated by the People's Republic of China. Another instance is the 2000 case of the League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA), French Union of Jewish Students, vs. Yahoo! Inc (USA) and Yahoo! France, where the French Court declared that "access by French Internet users to the auction website containing Nazi objects constituted a contravention of French law and an offence to the 'collective memory' of the country and that the simple act of displaying such objects (e.g. exhibition of uniforms, insignia or emblems resembling those worn or displayed by the Nazis) in France constitutes a violation of the Article R645-1 of the Penal Code and is therefore considered as a threat to internal public order."(Akdeniz, 2001).
Since the French judicial ruling many websites must abide by the rules of the countries in which they are accessible.
Freedom of Information
Freedom of information, that is the
freedom of speech as well as the freedom to seek, obtain and impart information brings up the question of who or what, has the jurisdiction in cyberspace. The right of freedom of information is commonly subject to limitations dependant upon the country, society and culture concerned.
Generally there are three standpoints on the issue as it relates to the internet. First is the argument that the internet is a form of media, put out and accessed by citizens of governments and therefore should be regulated by each individual government within the borders of their respective jurisdictions. Second, is that, "Governments of the Industrial World… have no sovereignty [over the internet] … We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, … You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." (Barlow, 1996). A third party believes that the internet supersedes all tangible borders such as the borders of countries, authority should be given to an international body since what is legal in one country may be against the law in the other
.
Cyber ethics is the study of morals pertaining to computer networks, encompassing user behavior and what networked computers are programmed to do, and how this affects individuals and society. Examples of cyber ethical questions include "Is it OK to display personal information about others on the Internet (such as their online status or their present location via GPS)? "Should users be protected from false information?" "Who owns digital data (such as music, movies, books, web pages, etc.) and what should users be allowed to do with it?" "How much access should there be to gambling online?" "Is access to the Internet a basic right that everyone should have?"
