It includes slides explaining the Five moral dimensions of information systems by Laudon and Laudon.

1. FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Facilitator: Mr. Roshan Bhattarai

2. FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF
ISs
1. INFORMATION RIGHTS: PRIVACY AND
FREEDOM
• Privacy is the claim of individuals to be free from
surveillance or interference from others
• Millions of employees are subject to electronic and other
forms of high-tech surveillance
• IT threatens individuals claims to privacy by making the
invasion of privacy cheap, profitable and effective.

3. • In United States
– Right to information Act, 2005
– Computer Security Act, 1987
– Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 1986
– Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 1998
– Fair Information Practices (FIP), 1973
– Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), 1996 : Personal
medical records
• In India
– Article 21 of Indian Constitution, right to privacy as fundamental Right
– Information Technology Rules, 2011
– The Credit Information Companies Regulation Act (CICRA), 2005 : customers
data protection of banks and others FIs
• European Directives
– European Commission’s Directive on Data Protection, 1998 : inform people
when they collect information about them
– Customers should provide Informed Consent (opt-in/opt-out) to
organizations
– US business firms should have a SAFE HARBOR, a self regulating policy or
enforcement that meet EU standards to use personal data

4. Internet Challenges to Privacy
• Information sent over internet can be monitored,
captured and stored before it reaches the destination
• Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, Double Click etc are
capable of tracking all browsing behavior at thousands of
websites using cookies
• Cookies are small text files deposited on web site visitor’s
hard drive which identify the visitor’s web browser and
tracks visits to the website. The site can customize its
contents for each visitor’s interests.

5. • Web beacons are tiny objects invisibly embedded in
email messages and web pages that are designed to
monitor the behavior of the user visiting a website or
sending email.
• It captures and transmits information such as IP address,
time of visit, the type of web browser etc
• Web beacons are usually placed on popular sites by
third party firms who pay websites a fee for access to
audience.
• Spyware can secretly install itself on an Internet user’s
computer
• Once installed, it can report the user’s movements on the
Internet.. Also called a “tracking software”..

6. Technical solutions
• The Platform for Privacy Preferences, known as P3P,
enables automatic communications of privacy policies
between site and its visitors.
• P3P enables websites to translate their privacy policies
into a standard format that can be read by the user’s
browser software.
• The browser software evaluates the web site’s privacy
policy to determine whether it is compatible with the
user’s privacy preferences.

7. FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF
ISs
2. PROPERTY RIGHTS: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
• ISs have challenged existing laws and social practices
that protect intellectual property
• Computerized information can be so easily copied or
distributed on networks
• Intellectual property is subject to a variety of
protections under 3 different legal traditions:
– Trade secrets
– Copyright
– Patent law

8. Trade Secret
• Any Intellectual work product- can be a formula, a
pattern, a device or compilation of data used for business
purpose can be classified as a trade secret
• Trade secret laws grant a monopoly on the ideas behind
a work product
• To make this claim, the creator or owner must take care
to bind employees and customers with nondisclosure
agreements and to prevent the secret from falling into
public domain.

9. Copyright
• Copyright is a legal grant that protects creators of
intellectual property from having their work copied by
others for any purpose during the life of the author plus
additional 70 years after author’s death.
• For corporate owned works, copyright protection lasts
for 95 years after their initial creation
• It includes books, software, lectures, dramas, maps,
musical compositions, drawings, artwork etc.

10. • The intent behind copyright laws has been to encourage
creativity and authorship by ensuring that creative
people receive the financial and other benefits of their
work.
• The underlying ideas behind a work are not protected,
only their manifestation (expression) of work
• “Look and feel” copyright infringements (violation)
lawsuits are precisely about the distinction between idea
and the expression.

11. Patents
• A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the
ideas behind an invention for 20 years
• The intent behind patent law is to ensure full financial
and other rewards
• Widespread use of invention is possible under license
from patent’s owner.
• The strength of patent protection is that it grants a
monopoly on the underlying concepts and ideas
• The difficulty is passing the criteria of originality, novelty
and invention.

12. Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights
• Digital media differs from other in terms of ease of
replication, transmission and alternation, making theft
easy and difficulties in establishing uniqueness
• Perfect digital copies cost almost nothing.
• Sharing of digital content over the Internet costs almost
nothing.
• Rate of global software piracy was 14% in 2010
• Over 60% of software sold in Asia-Pacific region is of
pirated version- Business Software Alliance, 2011
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), 1998 is
providing copyright protection to sell and distribute
books, articles and other intellectual property legally.

13. FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF
ISs
3. ACCOUNTABILITY, LIABILITY AND CONTROL
• New ISs are challenging existing liability laws and social
practices for holding individuals and institutions
accountable.
• If a person is injured by a machine controlled by
software, who should be held accountable and held
liable?
• If you outsource your information processing, can you
hold the external vendor liable for injuries done to your
customers?
• Should public online services permit the transmission of
offensive material?

14. Computer related liability problems
• According to banking regulation, the banks are the
custodians of the client’s money and hence are
responsible for its security and disbursal. Who should be
held responsible for cloned cards being worked through
the system?
• Computer software is a part of a machine, and the
machine injures someone physically or economically, the
producer of the software and the operator can be held
liable for damages
• Organizations can be held liable for offensive content on
their websites
• Online services might be held liable for postings by their
users

15. FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF
ISs
4. SYSTEM QUALITY: DATA QUALITY AND SYSTEM ERRORS
• What is an acceptable, technologically feasible level of
system quality?
• Individuals and organizations may be held responsible for
avoidable and foreseeable consequences
• Some system errors are correctable and foreseeable only
at very great expense, en expense so great that pursuing
this level of perfection is not feasible economically-no
one could afford the product.
• What is the responsibility of a producer of computer
services-should it withdraw the product that can never
be perfect, warn the user, or forget about the risk?

16. • Three principal sources of poor system performance are
– software bugs/errors
– hardware failure
– poor data input quality
• There is a technological barrier to perfect software and
users must be aware of the potential failure.
• No testing standards for producing acceptable software
has been arrived yet.
• By far, the most common source of business system
failure is the input data quality.

17. FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF
ISs
5. QUALITY OF LIFE
• The negative social costs of introducing information
technologies are beginning to mount along with the
power of technology
• Computers and Information technologies potentially can
destroy valuable elements of our culture and society

18. Some of the negative social consequences of systems are
discussed below:
• Maintaining boundaries: family, work and leisure
– Extensive internet use, takes people away from family and
friends
– “Do anything anywhere” can blur boundaries between work
and family time
– Lead to anti-social behavior
• Dependence and vulnerability
– Our institutions are highly dependent on information systems
and therefore highly vulnerable if these systems fail
– There are few regulatory standards to protect us from the
failure of complex electrical, communications, and computer
networks upon which we all depend
• Rapidity of Change: Reduced time to competition
– Businesses may not have enough time to respond to global
competitors, may wiped out of market

19. • Employment: Trickle down Technology and Job Loss
– Redesigning business processes could potentially cause
millions of workers to lose their jobs
– The rapid development of the Internet has made it possible to
offshore hundreds of thousands of jobs from high-wage
countries to low- wage countries.
• Equity and Access: Increasing Social Class Cleavages
– Does everyone have an equal opportunity to participate in the
digital age?
– Or will the cleavages be increased permitting the better off to
become even more better off relative to others?
– The digital divide could lead to a society of information haves,
literate, and skilled versus have-nots, illiterate and unskilled
• Computer Crime and Abuse
– New technologies create new opportunities for committing
crime and unethical activities
– Eg: Destroying company’s computer, Illegal access to critical
information, Spam messages, text messaging while driving etc.

20. • Health Risks
– The most common type of computer related Repetitive
Stress Injury (RSI) is Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS), in
which pressure on the median nerve through the wrist’s
bony structure, called a carpal tunnel, produces pain.
– Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is an eyestrain condition
related to display screen use in desktops, laptops, smart
phones etc more than 3 hours a day
– Techno-stress is induced by computer use resulting
impatience, fatigue, aggression towards humans etc.

21. – Experts say: humans working continuously with computers
come to expect other humans to behave like computers
providing instant responses, attentiveness, and absence of
emotion
– Also prevents humans from focusing and thinking clearly..
• Balancing Power: Center versus Periphery
– Centralized computing to centralize power and
decentralized computing to empower lower levels
– Lower levels may be empowered to make minor
decisions but key policy decisions may be centralized
– Is IT centralizing decision-making power in the hands of a
few, or is it allowing many more people to participate in
decisions that affect their lives?