Lecture 19 - Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues

Moral Dimensions of Information Age

Technology Trends:

  • storage costs decreasing: cheaper to store lots of information about individuals

  • Computing Power Increases: more dependence on computers (have access to more information) and can analyze lots of data quickly

  • Big Data Techniques: can develop (most accurate) profiles of individuals and make predictions on what they would like

  • Growth of Internet: easy to access or buy personal data

  • Growth of Mobile Phone Usage: location may be tracked without user knowledge or consent even if you turn off GPS location tracking on your phone

Implications

Those technology trends are having an impact on our society. They have raised five areas of ethical, social and political concern

  1. Personal information rights and obligations

  2. Digital property rights and obligations (music/video/software privacy)

  3. data and system quality (making sure data is correct and secure)

  4. Accountability, liability and control (who is held accountable for any harm done when personal data is stolen)

  5. Quality of Life (maintaining boundaries between work and home life)

Ethical, Social, Legal Aspects

Ethics: principles of right and wrong that individuals use to make choices to guide their behaviours (e.g. digital property rights

Social: affecting people and communication, i.e. etiquette expectations, social responsibility (acting for the benefit of society), changing social institutions (family, education, organization) e.g. work-life balance

legal/political: knowing the law and working within its limits, i.e. changing old laws, creating new laws, and understanding existing laws, e.g. personal information

Key Terms

Responsibility: accepting the potential costs, duties and obligations for decisions

Accountability: provide mechanisms to identify who is responsible, e.g. UW has a privacy officer

Liability: laws exist that permit individual to recover damages for harm done to them

Due process: laws are well known and understood, can appeal to a higher authority to ensure that the laws are applied correctly.

Ethics

Ethical Principles:

These principles provide different perspectives when considering a difficult decision by each asking different questions.

  • Golden rule: do unto others as you would have them unto you

  • Kant’s categorical imperative: if an action is not right for everyone to take, then it is not right for anyone

  • Descartes’ Rule of Change: if an action cannot be taken repeatedly, then it is not right to be taken at any time

  • Utilitarian Principle: Take the action that achieves the higher or greatest value for all concerned

  • Risk Aversion Principles: Take action that do not have a high cost of failure (even if probability is low)

What is considered Personal Information?

according to PIPEDA personal information (PI) includes:

  • demographics: age, income, ethnicity, religion, marital status

  • internet: email, address, contents of emails, IP address

  • Physical: age, height, weight, medical records, blood type, fingertips

  • financial: purchases, spending habits, banking info, credit/debit card data, loan, or credit reports, tax returns, SIN number

How is PI protected?

these protections only apply in Canada:

  • accountability: appoint someone to be responsible’

  • consent: inform you of the purpose of collecting that info

  • limiting use: only use it for purposes you consent to

  • safeguards: your PI must be protected

  • Individual access: you have the right to access your PI

PIPEDA’s principles for the treatment:

  • identifying purposes: the reason for collecting your PI must be indentified

  • limiting collection: only gather info that is necessary

  • accuracy: should keep your info accurate

  • openness: privacy policy should be easy to find and understand

  • resource: you should be provided with a complaint procedure

Concerns

Terms of service is the name we give to the document you consent to when you use a create an account at a website

Terms of service are often all-or-nothing, if you use the website or app you must agree to give up your privacy

Often companies will provide you PI to affiliates or trusted partners → who are they

Often companies say they keep information needed for business purposes → what PI and what purposes?

Often companies can keep your PI for as long as they want i.e. your PI has dual ownership

World Wide Web Challenges to Privacy

Cookes: a website stores a unique bit of data on your device

  • Think of the cookie as a primarily key identifying you in their database

  • They use this data to track your activity on their website

Third Party Cookies

  • Companies like Facebook, google, amazon, track your activity across many websites not just their own.

  • Even if you don’t have a FB account it still tracks you

  • They use this technology to get a more complete picture of you for advertising purposes.

Web Beacons: websites can tell that you’ve viewed a certain item, say and ad in your email.

  • typically a small picture the same colour as the background (not visible)

  • could be on a website or in an email

Spyware: software that gathers information about the user without the user’s knowledge.

  • Each smartphone has uniques international mobile (station) equipment identity (IMEI) associated with them that tracks that device and can be used to blacklist a phone in case of theft

Browser Fingerprinting

  • each computer/cell phone has many settings (like a “don’t track”) and hardware specs (what are the screen dimensions)

  • the combination of these properties that browsers can report makes each cell phone/laptop rare

  • this rareness provides a way for companies to track you even if many other tracking methods have been blocked