CH 3 Ethics for the Information Age (8th Edition)

3.1 Introduction

• M-PESA: Africa's mobile money platform, enabling financial transactions via mobile phones, especially beneficial in Kenya, reducing poverty and supporting entrepreneurship.
• Social Media Impact: While offering positive effects like relationship growth and emotional support, heavy social media use can negatively impact mental health, leading to anxiety and sleep issues.
• Macedonian Entrepreneurs: Exploited Facebook's share and Google's AdSense for profit, plagiarizing stories to generate traffic and ad revenue during the 2016 US election.
• eSports: Gaining global popularity with platforms like Twitch, transforming venues into eSports arenas, illustrating how networks are changing modern life, for good and bad.

3.2 Spam

• Definition: Unsolicited bulk email, term origins trace back to Monty Python's Flying Circus SPAM sketch.
• The rise of spam paralleled the commercialization of the Internet, leading to a "spam tsunami" by 2003, consuming bandwidth and storage.
• Spam filters were developed but substantial productivity costs remained for businesses.
• Spam is cost-effective: Advantages include low cost compared to traditional advertising.
• Email addresses were harvested through websites, chat rooms, viruses, and dictionary attacks.
• Botnets: Around 2009, 90% of spam originated from botnets, networks of compromised computers controlled by bot herders.
• Reduced spam: Efforts to shut down botnets and changes in spammers' behavior led to a decline in spam traffic since 2009.
• Social-Technical Solutions: Spam reflects a failure to consider social expectations when designing Internet and email technology.
• Fairness: Communications should be two-way, contrasting with one-way spam.

3.2.3 Case Study: Ann the Acme Accountant

• Kantian Analysis: Emphasizes respecting others' autonomy and not using them as a means to an end; suggests an "opt-in" approach shows respect for coworkers' time.
• Act-Utilitarian Analysis: Quantifies benefits (e.g., profit for Girl Scouts) and costs (e.g., wasted employee time); concludes Ann's action was good, although primarily benefited the Girls Scouts while costing Acme Corporation.
• Rule-Utilitarian Analysis: Considers consequences if everyone used company email for solicitations; concludes harms outweigh benefits, making such use wrong.
• Social-Contract-Theory Analysis: Ann exercised free speech but risked annoying recipients; this theory suggests her actions were within bounds.
• Virtue-Ethics Analysis: Focuses on virtues like honesty, fairness, and respect; Ann was honest but lacked fairness and respect by using the email system for personal solicitations.

3.3 Internet Interactions

• World Wide Web: The creation of the Web spurred Internet growth, originated as a documentation system for CERN, accessible via browsers [18].
• Hypertext System: Web, is a flexible database of linked pages.
• Decentralized: Individuals can add information to the Web without central authority.
• Unique Address: Every object on the Web has a URL, enabling linking.
• Mobile Apps: People are spending more time on smartphones and tablets, using mobile apps to access the Internet, optimized for mobile devices [19].
• Internet Uses Include:
  • Buying - E-commerce represented 9 percent of all retail sales in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2017.
  • Selling - Craigslist, a platform for classified ads.
  • Socializing - Facebook, a popular social network with over 2.2 billion monthly active users in March 2018.
  • Content Contribution - Apps like Instagram and wikis such as Wikipedia allow users to upload and edit content collaboratively.
  • Blogging - Blogs serve as personal journals.
  • Secret Websites - Darknets offer anonymity.
  • Crowdsourcing - Waze app and Kickstarter are examples of crowdsourcing for information and funding, respectively.
  • Learning - MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative allows the quantity and quality of freely available classes posted online to increase.
  • Exploring Roots - FamilySearch.org offers access to genealogy records.
  • Virtual Worlds - Online games like Fortnite attract millions of players, generating real economies based on virtual items.
  • Controlling IoT - Internet of Things enables control of devices via the Internet.
  • Taxes - About 90% of Americans' federal income tax returns for tax year 2017 were filed online.
  • Gambling - Internet gambling is a 44-billion-a-year global business.
  • Humanitarian action - Kiva supports person-to-person microlending.

3.4 Text Messaging

• Transforming Lives: Services like M-PESA in Kenya enable savings and bill payments via cell phones.
• Agriculture: Kenya's Agricultural Commodities Exchange delivers crop price information to farmers via text [39].
• Counterfeit Medicine: Scratch card codes help customers verify drug authenticity via text [39].
• Twitter: A social networking service for sending short text messages (tweets), is commonly used for broadcasting live information.
• Business Promotion: Businesses use Twitter as a marketing tool.

3.5 Political Impact of Social Media and Online Advertising

• Political Activism: Text messaging in ousting Philippine president Joseph Estrada in 2001 [43].
• Twitter, Facebook and the 2011 "Arab Spring" revolutions: Used for organizing and communication, with Al Jazeera tracking tweeting activity [44, 45].
• Scholars suggest online networks politicized users by exposing them to new ideas and human rights [46].
• Republican candidate in Massachusetts creating nine fake Twitter accounts, in 2010, to disparage the Democratic candidate [48].
• Advertising Revenue: Facebook and Google are giants in online advertising, popular as digital advertising channel [49].
• Macedonian Entrepreneurs: Capitalists in Macedonia leveraged Facebook and Google to make money before the 2016 US election [3].
• Internet Research Agency: IRA used social media to exert political influence in other countries by setting up accounts using false personas [51].
• The IRA's longer term goal was to increase polarization in the United States.
• Fake News Concerns: Is it possible that Facebook and Google are threatening trust, 'informed dialogue,' and 'a shared sense of reality [55].'
• Advertising: The rapid growth in advertising through social media have led people to be segregated into ideological "echo chambers" [55].
• Newspapers: Advertising revenues for print newspapers dropped from 44.9 billion in 2003 to 16.4 billion in 2014 [59].
• Thomas Jefferson: "[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter [62]."

3.6 Censorship

• Definition: Suppression or regulation of public access to offensive or harmful material, historically by governments and religious institutions.
• Government Monopolization: Government owns media outlets [64].
• Prepublication Review: Governments restrict information harmful to national security [64].
• Licensing and Registration: Used to control media with limited bandwidth [64].
• Self-Censorship: Groups decide not to publish material [64].
• Internet Challenges: Many-to-many communications, dynamic, huge, global, hard to distinguish children from adults [65].
• Government Filtering and Surveillance: Governments limit Internet access through various methods [65].
• Ethical Perspectives:
  • Kant suggests that people are not thinking for themself [73].
  • Principle of Harm: The government should intervene in private activities of individuals to prevent harm to others [74].

3.7 Freedom of Expression

• History: Political in nature to allow for an open discussion of public issues [76].
• Rights restricted to protect the greater public good [76].
• FCC v. Pacifica Foundation: Broadcasting has received the most limited First Amendment protection [80].
• Case Study: The need for permission to post an image to the web [80].

3.8 Children and Inappropriate Content

• Web Filters: Software prevent certain pages from being displayed [81].
• Child Internet Protection Act: Requires libraries, receiving federal funds, to install anti-pornography filters [82].
• Ethical Evaluations of CIPA: In this section we evaluate CIPA from the perspectives of Kantianism, act utilitarianism, and social contract theory.
• Sexting: The act of sending sexually suggestive text messages or emails usually containing nude or nearly nude photos to others

3.9 Breaking Trust

• Identity Theft: The misuse of another person's identity, such as name, Social Security number, driver’s license, credit card numbers, and bank account numbers [95].
• Fake Reviews: Some businesses try to boost sales by posting fake positive reviews [101].
• Online Predators: Instant Messaging is a system allowing two people to 'chat' via typing in real time over any Internet connection [103].
• Ethical Evaluations of Police Sting Operations: Police Detectives entrap pedophiles and pose as children on the Internet and agreeing to meet with them.
• False Information: The web is a more open communication medium than newspapers, radio stations, or television stations [103].
• Cyberbullying: Is the use of the Internet or the phone system to inflict psychological harm on another person [111].
• Revenge Porn: Posting pornographic material without consent [121].

3.10 Internet Addiction

• Real or Not: Excessive use of the internet can have a negative impact [128].
• Contributing Factors to Addiction: Kimberly Young’s studies led her to “believe that behaviors related to the Internet have the same ability to provide emotional relief, mental escape, and ways to avoid problems as do alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling.”
• Ethical Evaluation of Internet Addiction: People who use digital devices excessively can harm themselves and others for whom they are responsible.