لخّصلي

Organizations and their employees face numerous ethical challenges in conducting business. Table 4.1 provides a small sample of recent cases involving failures in ethical business judgment. These lapses in judgment occurred across a broad spectrum of industries.
In today’s environment, employees who are convicted of violating the law face the risk of time in prison. International treaties and Interpol, enabled by global informa- tion systems, have made it possible to extradite, prosecute, arrest, and imprison busi- ness managers suspected of criminal activity on a global basis.
Although business firms in the past often paid for the legal defense of employees enmeshed in civil charges and criminal investigations, firms are now encouraged to cooperate with prosecutors to reduce charges against the firm itself. More than ever, as a manager or employee, you will have to decide for yourself what constitutes proper legal and ethical conduct.
Failures in ethical business judgment are not usually masterminded by employees of information systems departments, but information systems are often instrumental in many of these frauds. In many cases, the perpetrators of these crimes artfully used information systems to bury their actions from public scrutiny.
We deal with the issue of information systems controls in Chapter 8. In this chap- ter, we will talk about the ethical dimensions of these and other actions based on the use of information systems.
Ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behavior. Information systems raise ethical questions for both individuals and societies because these systems create op- portunities for intense social change and, thus, threaten existing distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations. Like other technologies, such as steam engines, electric- ity, and the telephone, information technology can be used to achieve social progress, but it can also be used to commit crimes and threaten cherished social values. The devel- opment of information technology will produce benefits for many and costs for others.
Ethical issues in information systems have been given additional urgency by the rise of the Internet and e-commerce. Internet and digital technologies make it easier than ever to assemble, integrate, and distribute information, unleashing concerns about the appropriate use of customer information, the protection of personal pri- vacy, and the protection of intellectual property.
Other pressing ethical issues that information systems raise include setting stan- dards to safeguard system quality that protect the safety of the individual and society, establishing accountability for the consequences of information systems, and preserv- ing values and institutions considered essential to the quality of life in today’s infor- mation society. When using information systems, it is essential to ask, “What is the ethical and socially responsible course of action?”
A MODEL FOR THINKING ABOUT ETHICAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL ISSUES
Ethical, social, and political issues are closely linked. The ethical dilemma you may face as someone who is involved in the use of information systems by your organiza- tion typically is reflected in social and political debate. Examine Figure 4.1, which illustrates one way to think about these relationships. Imagine society as a more or less calm pond on a summer day, a delicate ecosystem in partial equilibrium with individuals and with social and political institutions. Individuals know how to act in this pond because social institutions (family, education, organizations) have devel- oped well-honed rules of behavior, and these rules are supported by laws developed in the political sector that prescribe behavior and promise sanctions for violations. Now toss a rock into the center of the pond. What happens? Ripples, of course. Imagine instead that the disturbing force is a powerful shock of new information technology and systems hitting a society more or less at rest. Suddenly, individual actors are confronted with new situations often not covered by the old rules. Social institutions cannot respond overnight to these ripples—it may take years to develop etiquette, expectations, social responsibility, politically correct attitudes, or approved rules. Political institutions also require time to develop new laws and often require the demonstration of real harm before they act. In the meantime, you may have to act. You may be forced to act in a legal gray area.
We can use this model to illustrate the dynamics that connect ethical, social, and political issues. This model is also useful for identifying the main moral dimensions of the information society, which cut across various levels of action—individual, social, and political.
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 these rights protect? • Property rights and obligations How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society in which tracing and accounting for ownership
are difficult while ignoring such property rights is so easy?
• System quality What standards of data quality and system quality should we
demand to protect individual rights and the safety of society?
• Accountability and control Who can and will be held accountable and liable for
the harm done to individual and collective information and property rights? •Quality of life What values should be preserved in an information- and knowledge-based society? Which institutions should we protect from violation?
Which cultural values and practices does the new information technology support?

KEY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT RAISE ETHICAL ISSUES
Ethical issues long preceded information technology. Nevertheless, information tech- nology has heightened ethical concerns, taxed existing social arrangements, and made some laws obsolete or insufficient. Technological trends that are responsible for many of these ethical stresses are summarized in Table 4.2.
The doubling of computing power every 18 months over the past several decades has made it possible for most organizations to use information systems for their core pro- duction processes. As a result, our dependence on systems and our vulnerability to sys- tem errors and poor data quality have increased. Social rules and laws have not yet fully adjusted to this dependence. In addition, standards for ensuring the accuracy and reli- ability of information systems (see Chapter 8) are not universally accepted or enforced.
Advances in data storage techniques and rapidly declining storage costs have enabled the collection of Big Data and been responsible for the proliferation of data- bases on individuals—employees, customers, and potential customers—maintained by private and public organizations. These advances in data storage have made the routine violation of individual privacy both inexpensive and effective. Data storage systems for terabytes and petabytes of data are now available onsite or as online ser- vices for firms of all sizes to use in identifying customers.
Advances in data analysis techniques for large pools of data are another techno- logical trend that heightens ethical concerns because organizations can find out highly detailed personal information about individuals. With contemporary data management tools (see Chapter 6), companies can assemble and combine myriad pieces of data about you stored in information systems much more easily than they could in the past.
Think of all the ways you generate digital information about yourself—browsing online; using mobile apps; making online and in-person retail and service purchases; interacting with the financial services industry; participating in social networks; making mobile phone calls; using a smart TV, smart speaker, and other smart home devices; driving an Internet-enabled car; as well as interacting with local, state, and federal government institutions (including courts and the police). Each one of these actions generates digital data. Put together and mined properly, this information can reveal not only your credit information but also your tastes, your associations, what you read and watch, your political interests, your driving habits, and more.
Companies purchase personal information from a variety of sources to help them more finely target their marketing campaigns. Chapters 6 and 11 describe how companies can analyze large pools of data from multiple sources to rapidly identify buying patterns of customers and make individualized recommendations. The use of computers to combine data from multiple sources and create digital dossiers of de- tailed information on individuals is called profiling.
For example, Google Marketing Platform tracks the activities of visitors of par- ticipating websites and uses this information to create a profile of each online visi- tor, adding more detail to the profile as the visitor accesses an associated Google Marketing Platform site. Over time, Google Marketing Platform can create a detailed dossier of a person’s spending and online behavioral habits that is sold to companies to help them target their online ads more precisely. Advertisers can combine online consumer information with offline consumer information such as credit card pur- chases at stores.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions gathers data from police, criminal, and motor vehicle records; credit and employment histories; current and previous addresses; professional licenses; and insurance claims to assemble and maintain dossiers on almost every adult in the United States. The company sells this personal information to businesses and government agencies. Demand for personal data is so enormous that data broker businesses, such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Datalogix, and DataRaker, are flourishing. The three major credit monitoring services, TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, also maintain huge databases of personal data.
A data analysis technology called nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) has given both the government and the private sector even more powerful profiling ca- pabilities. Examine Figure 4.2, which illustrates how NORA works. NORA can take information about people from many disparate sources, such as “watch” lists, incident and arrest systems, consumer transaction systems, telephone records, and human re- sources systems, and correlate relationships to find obscure connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists. NORA technology processes the data and extracts information as the data are being generated so that, for example, it can—before a per- son boards an airplane—instantly discover that the person at the airline ticket counter has the same phone number as a known terrorist. NORA is also often used by the ca- sino industry as an anti-fraud technology. Although NORA technology is considered a valuable security tool, it does have privacy implications because it can provide such a detailed picture of the activities and associations of a particular individual.
Advances in networking, including the Internet, have greatly reduced the costs of accessing large quantities of data and have enabled the mining of large pools of data using desktop/laptop computers, mobile devices, and cloud servers, permitting an invasion of privacy on a scale and with a precision heretofore unimaginable. The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones, that users carry everywhere means that users can potentially be tracked without their knowledge or consent.
Finally, companies and individuals are increasingly relying on AI technologies as a substitute for human judgment in decision making. However, doing so raises serious ethical issues. Human judgment relies not only on reasoning but also on other human capabilities, such as empathy, and also typically takes into account factors that inform moral and ethical behavior. AI, on the other hand, may make decisions without regard to consequences that might violate ethical and moral standards. Another issue with AI is that it reduces multidimensional reality into a more simplistic representation of the world, one that appears on the surface to be precise and undeniably correct, thus encouraging acceptance of its decisions without questioning them. We discuss this issue further in Chapter 11 (Moser, den Hond, and Lindebaum, 2022).