CYBER ETHICS

Ethics In Corporate Society

1/18/2013

Social interaction and communication shape our daily lives, our interaction with
each other determines not only the outcome of our lives but also of the people
around us. The internet has transformed the way we communicate and disperse
information; it has shortened the time that is takes to transfer information and
messages. But it cannot be denied that the use of internet has brought about major
issues regarding security, cyber crime, employment and working conditions. In
this paper several issues regarding cyber ethics will be highlighted and analyzed
with respect to the utilitarian, care and rights views of ethics.

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Contents
Introduction ................................................................................ 2
Intellectual Property Rights ........................................................ 3
The Digital Divide. ..................................................................... 4
Privacy And Data Collection: ..................................................... 5
The Third Industrial Revolution: ................................................ 6
Conclusion.................................................................................. 8
References .................................................................................. 9
Appendix I ................................................................................ 10
Appendix II............................................................................... 11
Appendix III ............................................................................. 12

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INTRODUCTION
Just as ethics is a philosophical study of man kinds code of conduct, of our behaviour of the
principles that govern the actions of an individual or a group; specifically, the standards we use to
decide what our conduct should be.

Similarly Cyber ethics is the study of ethics on computer networks, of what kind of information can
or should be shared on the internet, should there be government censorship of the internet,
intellectual property rights, privacy and identity theft, unethical e-marketing techniques and the
most important point from a students perspective plagiarism. Cyber ethics deals with the changes
brought about in our individual and social behavior due to the rapid advancements in technology in
general and the internet in particular.

Social interaction and communication shape our daily lives, our interaction with each other
determines not only the outcome of our lives but also of the people around us. The internet has
transformed the way we communicate and disperse information; it has shortened the time that is
takes to transfer information and messages. But it cannot be denied that the use of internet has
brought about major issues regarding security, cyber crime, employment and working conditions.

In this paper several issues regarding cyber ethics will be highlighted and analyzed with respect to
the utilitarian, care and rights views of ethics. The purpose of this paper is to send out the message
that it is extremely important to understand for all students of our times, especially business
students that information technology has also had detrimental effects on the society and its people.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Intellectual property rights are the right of an individual over his ideas, designs, thoughts, or
inventions which resulted from his own creativity. The internet and the number of its users are
expanding day by day, and consequentially is becoming increasingly difficult to protect ones
original content. Technologies like Peer-to-peer file sharing are also promoting intellectual
property theft.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA as it is commonly known, was a bill introduced to expand
the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property
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and counterfeit goods . It was met by worldwide protests and thousands of websites including
Wikipedia (English) and Reddit coordinated a service blackout on January 18 2012, as it
allegedly violated freedom of expression and privacy of internet users, if it was implemented a
lot of websites would have been blocked because they hosted content from sources which were
not their own. During this month the US government also pressurised other government to
implement similar laws in their respective countries, but all this stopped when the bill wasnt
approved by the Judiciary House committee because of lack of consensus.

The case of the music file sharing site Napster is well known among internet users. The site was
co-founded by Sean Parker, John Fanning and Shawn Fanning and allowed internet users to
download music files from their peers system directly using peer-to-peer file sharing
technology. It was shut down by court order because its operations were heavily damaging music
artists and record labels.

The school of thought that is in favour of protection of intellectual property rights on the internet
comprises of a small minority of the internet users, according to them, if the artists and scholars
arent given appropriate monetary rewards for the work that they produce, there will be no
incentive for them to do so. So in a way, it is for the greater good of the society to give credit
where it is due by buying things that are available for sale instead of downloading them illegally.
People or organizations would never invest their times and resources to produce or come up with
something new or better if they werent getting anything out of it. The people in favour of it have
a totally different point of view all together. They say that the internet has allowed creators of
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Overview
original content faster and unrestricted access to the masses, hereby reducing their transfer costs
and giving them greater exposure. But enforcement of IP rights prevents access of those people
to such content who cannot afford it. So according to this school of thought, it is the right
of every individual to have access to information for his growth and development. Also as per
Metcalfes Law , information will be more productive if more people have access to it, so
according to the utilitarian view of ethics, it is in the greater good of the society that
downloading content for free be made legal

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE.

The digital divide is the gap or inequality between groups and social classes in terms of economic
development due to the lack of access, use, and lack of knowledge of information and
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communication technologies . It is one of the most significant subclasses of cyber ethics. The
digital divide is not an economic issue that can be solved just by providing the underprivileged poor
classes with appropriate infrastructure, but it is also a literacy issue. People should be educated and
trained so they dont become passive users of these technologies and not become consumers of
content created by other people, but rather be active users and also contribute to and make additions
to the already existing content by providing their original input.

Ong (1982) argues that technology transforms consciousness, noting that a qualitative difference
exists between the literate and oral minds. He implies a qualitative difference between the hyper
literate and literate minds. As public access becomes more available through libraries,
community centers, and churches, the social relevance of cyberspace as a tool to teach
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interculturalism will become stronger. Interculturalism within and between developed and
developing countries is not a new fad; in fact, it has been a trend in progress ever since
audio/visual technologies opened the world to globalization. The reason we need to recognize the
directions in which trends like these are naturally taking us is so that we can better prepare for a
future that we cannot presently understand, and that future is a truly global and interconnected
community.

2
U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunicatons and Information Administration (NTIA). 1995.
Falling through the net: A survey of the "have nots" in rural and urban America. Retrieved from
http://www.nta.doc.gov/ntahome/fallingthru.html.
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(Mahfood, 2005)
PRIVACY AND DATA COLLECTION:
Privacy is as important to a person as his identity, but advancements in technology, ever since the
advent of cameras, have proved detrimental to the control which one has over his privacy.
Governments have been pressurising ISPs (internet service providers) to hand over the internet
surfing information of its customers, reasons for this invasion of privacy have varied from time to
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time . Sometimes they do it in the name of national security sometimes for the sake of protecting
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intellectual property of corporations, regardless it is as unethical as it is inhumane . But At the
present time, almost every organization to which Internet users provide their contact information
explicitly posts some form of privacy statement, disclosing that none of the private data will be
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disclosed to anyone without the users permission.

When doing online transactions people have to give up a lot of personal information and it is upto
the financial intermediaries (like banks , visa, PayPal ) to protect this information 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. There are a lot
of conspiracy theories which assert that search engines sell private user data to corporations so that
they can interpret consumer preferences from it. This is partially true, websites and search engines
do assign specific tracking cookies to all users to analyse the bounce back rates for sites and to
make sure that the advertising revenue is being well spent, but despite their entire noble intentions
they end up collecting a lot of valuable data about people.

Discussion of Cyber Ethics and privacy cannot be complete without Zombie PCs, a computer
connected to the internet whose security has been compromised by a Trojan Zombies can be used to
conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks, a term which refers to the orchestrated flooding of
target websites by large numbers of computers at once. The large number of Internet users making
simultaneous requests to a website's server intended to result in crashing and the prevention of
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legitimate users from accessing the site. A variant of this type of flooding is known as

4
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/09/28/feds-snooping-internet/
5
https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy
6
7 (Mahfood, 2005)
Weisman, Steve (2008). The Truth about Avoiding Scams. FT Press. pp. 201. ISBN 0-13-233385-6.

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distributed degradation-of-service. Committed by "pulsing" zombies, distributed degradation-of-
service is the moderated and periodical flooding of websites, done with the intent of slowing down
rather than crashing a victim site. The effectiveness of this tactic springs from the fact that intense
flooding can be quickly detected and remedied, but pulsing zombie attacks and the resulting slow-
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down in website access can go unnoticed for months and even years. It is also done to generate
invalid clicks on ads so that the hacker can earn advertising commission faster. This is illegal and
can result in years of sentence.

THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION:

In his article A third industrial revolution: Special report: Manufacturing and Innovation, Paul
Markillie writes about how manufacturing is moving back to the developed world because of new
emerging technologies. Because of their cheap labour, manufacturing was outsourced to countries
like china and India, but this trend is changing - workers in these newly industrialised countries are
demanding better quality of life and consequentially the cost of labour is gradually rising,
digitization and automation is decreasing the number of labour required in factories, the need of job
creation and a lot of other factors have pushed industrialists to bring their production plants back to
the developed world, and Paul Markillie has termed this shift as the third industrial revolution.
According to him there is also a change in the manufacturing job, the need for unskilled labour is
diminishing. Unlike the last industrial revolution where factories worked with a large number of
unskilled labours, this time around things will be the opposite, skilled and well trained individuals
will be required to supervise, maintain and operate easy to use machinery and robots which will be
doing the actual manufacturing work. Because of the changes in jobs, employees now require a
different kind of supervision. Just as in the old times supervision was done to make sure the each
worker was doing his assigned tasks, now employees are monitored so that they dont use the
companys internet to access irrelevant websites to waste their time and the companys resources.

Throughout history we have seen that economies transition from agriculture to manufacturing and
now they are moving towards a point where manufacturing and services will go hand in hand.
Services like installation, maintenance, warranty, delivery etc have become part of the product

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Schwabach, Aaron (2006). Internet and the Law. ABC-CLIO. pp. 325. ISBN 1-85109-731-7.
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package, and no production house can survive in this competitive world by providing the consumer
with the product alone.

Clusters where students and manufacturing firms operate in close proximity are emerging, enabling
development of new ideas and faster innovation. Virtualization and simulation has made training of
students and testing of new products easier and cheaper. Just as with Moores Law and Metcalfes
Law, ideas and innovations are also being developed and refined at an extremely alarming rate.
New materials and manufacturing methods are also being developed as alternatives for current raw
materials. Carbon fibre as an alternative of steel and aluminium is the perfect example of the
progress that is being made in the field of material research. Programmable automation and flexible
process production and assembly lines allow multiple types of products to be made on the same
production line in increasingly cost an effective manner. Because of digitization production
processes are becoming more efficient as we speak, allowing products to be made in smaller
numbers economically. In the future, manufacturing of medicines and clinical products will be a lot
different from what it is now, instead of a single global manufacturing plant, medicines will be
made to order in small local production houses located in most, if not all, cities, as per the demand
of their respective localities, negating the need for franchising and greatly reducing the inventory
holding costs for both materials and finished medicines alike.

In this new age 3D printing is going to play a major role. Through 3D printing, one of a kind,
customized products can be made much cheaper than it would have normally cost. It allows young
and aspiring entrepreneurs to test and promote their products. Up till now manufacturing
organization have made money through economies of scale, mass production reduces the per
product fixed cost, but this is opposite for 3D printing, just like the cost of one printed paper does
not differ from paper to paper, here the cost of a printed part differs only because of its mass. Also
additive manufacturing has certain advantages over traditional manufacturing techniques like
injection moulding and subtractive manufacturing. At times engineers come up with designs that
are too complex to be made through these traditional methods but can be easily manufactured by
using 3D printing. The beauty of this technology is that the materials that can be printed is
increasing and is not limited to plastics only, in fact metal parts can now be printed as well. 3D
printing allows rapid prototyping for testing and real life testing of scaled down models. Printing of
master parts for mould making is also possible, an advantage that is being exploited by fashion
designers and artists. It is common knowledge that small businesses play a major role in the
economy and help in creating a lot of employments, before the existence of 3D printing many
entrepreneurs were restricted by their lack of capital and inability to create, prototype and test their
products, because of which a lot of inventions never got past their designing stage and were left to
rot in the minds and computers of their innovators. But through the advent of social manufacturing
and 3D printing, websites like shapeways.com allow designers to setup their own shops for 3D
printed products, models and even replacement parts for broken machines.

One of the most important responsibilities of the management of a company is to ensure the
security and quality of its IT-enabled business activities. Security management tools and policies
can ensure the accuracy, integrity, and safety of the information systems and resources of a
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company and thus minimize errors, fraud, and security losses in its business activities.

CONCLUSION
The impact of information technology and the internet on our lives is phenomenal. It has
changed the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us, it has evolved our laws and our
societys norms and values. It has sped us drastically the speed of emerging fads and fading
trends. To survive, let alone survive in this era it is imperative that we have a basic knowledge of
the internet and the dangers that it brings at our doorstep.

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Obrien,Marakas . Management Informaton Systems 10e, 2010
REFERENCES
DUHIGG, . and BRADSHER, K. (2012) How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. The New York
Times, [online] 21st January 2012. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-
class.html?ref=technology&pagewanted=all&_r=0 [Accessed: 14th January 2013].

http://helldesign.net (2001) The Law of Accelerating Returns | KurzweilAI. [online] Available at:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns [Accessed: 14 Jan 2013].

Markillie, P. (2012) A Third Industrial Revolution. Iss. Special Report : Manufacturing and
Innovation.

Unknown. (2012) Advocacy: Voice of Small Businesses in the Government. [e-book] US Small
Business Administration. http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FINAL%20FAQ
%202012%20Sept%202012%20web.pdf [Accessed: 14th January 2013].

Guth, Robert A.. "How 3-D Printing Figures To Turn Web Worlds Real (The Wall Street Journal,
December 12, 2007)". Available at:
http://www.zcorp.com/documents/194_2007-1212-Wall Street Journal-3DP Turns Web World
Real.pdf [Retrieved: 2012-01-31].

U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration

(NTIA). 1995. Falling through the net: A survey of the "have nots" in rural and urban America.
Retrieved from http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fallingthru.html.
APPENDIX I
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Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics

The ethical values as defined in 1992 by the Computer Ethics Institute; a nonprofit organization
whose mission is to advance technology by ethical means, lists these rules as a guide to computer
ethics:

1. Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people.

2. Thou shalt not interfere with other people's computer work.

3. Thou shalt not snoop around in other people's computer files.

4. Thou shalt not use a computer to steal.

5. Thou shalt not use a computer to bear false witness.

6. Thou shalt not copy or use proprietary software for which you have not paid.

7. Thou shalt not use other people's computer resources without authorization or proper
compensation.

8. Thou shalt not appropriate other people's intellectual output.

9. Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you are writing or the system
you are designing.

10. Thou shalt always use a computer in ways that ensure consideration and respect for your
fellow humans (Computer Ethics Institute, 1992).
10
Computer Ethics Institute (1992). "The Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics" (PDF). Computer Ethics
Institute. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
APPENDIX II
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RFC 1087

In January 1989, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) in RFC 1087 defines an activity as unethical
and unacceptable if it:

1. Seeks to gain unauthorized access to the resources of the Internet.

2. Disrupts the intended use of the Internet.

3. Wastes resources (people, capacity, computer) through such actions.

4. Destroys the integrity of computer-based information, or

5. Compromises the privacy of users (RFC 1087, 1989).

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Network Working Group. (1989). "Ethics and the Internet". Network Working Group. Retrieved 2008-05-
01. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1087
APPENDIX III
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(ISC) Code of Ethics

(ISC) an organization committed to certification of computer security professional has further

defined its own Code of Ethics generally as:

1. Act honestly, justly, responsibly, and legally, and protecting the commonwealth.

2. Work diligently and provide competent services and advance the security profession.

3. Encourage the growth of research teach, mentor, and value the certification.

4. Discourage unsafe practices, and preserve and strengthen the integrity of public
infrastructures.

5. Observe and abide by all contracts, expressed or implied, and give prudent advice.

6. Avoid any conflict of interest, respect the trust that others put in you, and take on only those
jobs you are qualified to perform.

7. Stay current on skills, and do not become involved with activities that could injure the
reputation of other security professionals (Harris, 2003).

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Harris, Shon (2003). CISSP Certification: Exam Guide Second Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Osbourne. ISBN 0-07-
222966-7.