Ethical, Professional and Cultural Issues of Information and Communication Technology - Essay Example

Ethical, professional and cultural issues of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) In today’s world globalization and the digital convergence has raised a variety of complex legal, ethical and societal issues. The world has been faced with a lot of complex and difficult questions regarding the access to information, freedom of expression, intellectual property rights, the right to privacy and cultural diversity. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an instrumental need for everyone in regards to gathering of information and knowledge. Step should be taken so that it can be guaranteed as a basic right to for everyone. All around the world, rights which have already legally been recognized are daily being violated, whether it is in the name of economic advancement, some religious causes, political stability, the fight against terrorism, or for various personal greed and interests. These violations of rights has created new problems in the human social systems, such as the digital divide, digital security, cybercrime and a number of privacy concerns, all of these have affected people’s lives either indirectly or directly. It is important for the countries like Britain to come up with an assessment of the current situation, followed by a guideline for a plan of action to combat the incidence of malicious attacks on the integrity, confidentiality and availability of electronic data and systems, forgery and fraud, computer crimes, content related offenses, such as those which are related to child pornography and violations of the intellectual property rights (IPRs). Taking this another step forward there are threats to the critical infrastructure and national interests are arising from the use of the internet for criminal and terrorist activities which has become a growing concern over the past few years. The damage incurred to governments, businesses and individuals in these countries in which the internet is used widely, is fast gaining scope and importance. Consumers have started losing confidence in transactions and businesses, due to this opportunity costs may rise to substantial heights. Information technology has had a massive impact on people from all walks of life, all around the world. Major developments in ICT has made it possible for a transition of information processing, storage and dissemination, from paper to virtual, which is now setting new heights of speed, accuracy and efficiency in all human activities. Latest computerized databases are being extensively used to store all forms of confidential data of political, economic, social or personal nature for the support of human activities and to bring various benefits to the society in general. Nevertheless the swift development of ICT all around the world has led to the increase in a variety of national and transnational crimes. These crimes no boundaries what so ever and may influence any country in any part of the world. Internationally, internet and computer related commerce and communications has cut across territorial boundaries, which has helped in the creation of a new area of human activities, overall undermining the feasibility and legitimacy of applying laws which are based on a number of geographic boundaries. These new boundaries, which have grown in the firewalls, in monitor screens, various forms of intruder detection, passwords and virus busters. This has lead to the creation of new groups, personalities, organizations and various new forms of economic, social and political groupings in the cyber world. This new environment of cyber boundaries has become very challenging for the traditional border based law making and law enforcing authorities. These cyber systems present across the world have many different policies governing the behaviour of its users. These users are absolutely free to leave or join any system whose rules they find comfortable or uncomfortable. This elasticity may at times lead to unacceptable user conduct. Hence in the absence of any viable legal framework, it may become difficult for most System Administrators to check on these frauds, vandalism or against other abuses and this may cause the lives of many online users to be miserable. This situation becomes alarming because this element of distrust from the internet may lead to people avoiding online transactions, which in turn will indirectly affect the growth of ecommerce. In addition to this, terrorists and terrorist organizations may also make use of this resource web to create conspiracies and for violence. Moving on, these ethics can be viewed from a variety of different angles, two of which are prescriptive and normative. Ethics basically refers to well positioned standards of right and wrong which prescribe what humans beings ought to do, usually in terms of obligations, rights, fairness, benefits to society and some specific virtues. These ethical standards also include those which command virtues of compassion, honesty and loyalty. They also include standards relating to basic rights, right to freedom from injury, right to life, right to choose, right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression and speech. So these standards are sufficient standards of ethics because they are supported by dependable and well founded reasons. Thus moving towards ICT ethics are not outstanding from afore mentioned view of ethics. In this world where information and communication technology has come to classify how people work and live, and so has critically affected the culture and values. Hence it is important to analyze these ethical issues, as well as the social responsibility. The issue of ICT ethics takes on added significance as Britain struggles with the current political environment and the dynamics of globalization which has undergone a major change over the last few years. Therefore now ICT helps in assisting and extending the ability of humans to store, process, capture, use, create, understand and broadcast information at speeds and scales which had never been thought possible in the past. So some of the shocks and changes of ICT are very apparent, but many of them are still pretty clever. In today’s western society more and more people are being employed for collecting, handling and the distribution of information, as compared to any other occupation. Millions and millions of computers populate this world and there are many millions of miles of wire, optical fibre and air waves link different people, their computers and the vast amount of information handling and processing devices together. Hence this society is truly an information society and this age is an information age. So the question is whether the kind of society being created actually needed. There are a variety of challenges being faced by the people in this age of information. Hence information is the means by which the minds expands and increase its ability to attain its goals. Therefore information forms the rational capital from which people craft their lives and secure dignity. This intellectual capital is impaired whenever there is a loss of personal information without the individual in question being compensated for it, when they are prohibited access to information which is of value to them, when they have exposed information they hold close, or when they find out the information upon which their living depends is in error. The social contract among people in the information age must deal with these threats to human dignity. The ethical issues involved are many and varied. Privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility are the pillars of information communication technology. Privacy is affected by the growth of information technology, with its superior capacity for observation, message, storage, computation and recovery. A more dangerous threat is the augmented value of information in decision making. Thus information is increasingly precious to policy makers; they desire it even if acquiring it invades another individual’s privacy. Most invasions of privacy creep up on us slowly when a group of diverse files relating to a person and his or her activities are included into a single large database. This collection of information reveals personal details about an individual and can thus deny the person of the opportunity to form certain professional and personal relationships. So this can be defined as the ultimate cost of invasion of privacy. So why is there an integration of databases taking place? This happens because the bringing together of different data helps in making the development of new information relationships probable. These new relationships can be formed by this should not be done without the affected parties consent. Different people may have contributed information about themselves freely to separate databases but this by itself does not mean that they have given consent to someone or some organization to merge the data, especially if this merger might reveal something about the individuals in question. Hence this threat to privacy is one that many individuals do not fully appreciate. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) encompass all those technologies which facilitate the conduct of information and facilitate different forms of communication among human actors, between human beings and electronic systems, and among electronic systems. These technologies can be divided into capturing technologies, storage technologies, processing technologies, communications technologies and display technologies. The implementation of digital technologies reduces and helps eliminate the limitations which previously controlled and disciplined the information conduct. So without these limitations, it has now been made possible to abuse a million people directly, their activities can be monitored around the clock, to store personal information about their activities and misdemeanours forever, and to reconstruct their experiences by using a variety of digital manipulation techniques. Partially the moral challenges posed by digital technologies are based in usual questions made more pressing in the context of a digital world. As there is a lot of information available in digital form, there is always more information which people would prefer to have censored: thus the transnational nature of digital networks forms situations in which information is illegal in the sending country and perfectly suitable in the receiving country, or vice versa. Since this has always been the case to some extent in a lot of examples, the utter rapidity and elasticity by which information transmission is now taking place makes border controls between countries less practical than ever before. Modern digital technologies have made unclear earlier dividing lines between broadcasting in the public area and narrowcasting in the private sector. In fact, this division between regulatory domains which was once considered to be very convenient is slowly disappearing. In today’s era personal and private e-mails can be broadcasted to a million receivers all around the world, most of these individuals never even asked to receive the message in the first place. In addition to this, these digital technologies have made the manipulation of images, data and sound so easy that it is now even possible to use and reuse all sorts of different materials without consulting the original author or owner. These rules against such piracy activities cannot always be legally imposed and hence there is a large grey area of contested rational ownership emerges. Thus it is exactly for this reason that every individual must make moral decisions about what they themselves judge to be defined as a justifiable behaviour. A similar problem occurs with regard to the protection of privacy. In today’s digital age, the rapidly increasing volumes of personal information are being collected, stored and sold through a variety of enormous electronic systems. These new technologies have greatly increased the ability to respond to the specific data needs of particular users. Thus it is now possible to map an individual’s movement precisely through the electronic trace left behind as we use rent cars, credit cards, buy airline tickets and purchase items in department stores. The precise pattern of communication between any individual network user and the rest of this system can also be recreated using the process mentioned before. This has thus created the potential for a massive invasion of people’s privacy. Another example of a troubling violation of privacy is the growing trend to engage in the electronic monitoring of employees and individuals. This occurrence can encompass secret audio and video taping, the monitoring of video display terminals to check employee performance, the opening of electronic mail and the widespread bugging of telephones. This has also increased the risk of privacy infringement. The dangers involved in this process are particularly illustrative because they are beyond the range of the employers physical supervision, the necessary supervision of the execution of the work will take place via the on-line telecommunication connection with the workers terminal. Consequently, the worker is subject to the possibility of continuous supervision by an invisible employer. Moreover, the fact that the workers terminal is located at home means that the employer can also monitor certain aspects of the workers daily routine. In addition to this, a very recent, threat to privacy involves the use of medical and biological information. The collection of sensitive personal data through diagnostic techniques like genetic screening and storing this information is becoming a reality; and these techniques can generate information about future diseases. The potential for exclusion of high-risk persons from employment or health insurance is great under such circumstances. Thus a real prospect looms which is that different organizations might sell such genetic profiles to insurers and employers. This violation of privacy will follow the spread of advanced digital technology around the world. People around the world have very different conceptions of privacy. Different societies have a variety of different privacy beliefs some believe in a much stronger emphasis on the protected individualistic life-world than in other societies. Yet human beings around the world know that information about them can be used for destructive means and that surveillance by power holders and government organizations is a development about which every individual should be very suspicious and cautious. This protection of personal privacy is not only important for individual citizens but also for nations on a whole. This digital technology helps in creating transparent societies and the glass-house countries have become very vulnerable to a number of external forces which can undermine their sovereignty. Hence not only does digital technology magnify old and inbred moral concerns, but they also raise completely new moral issues which are thoroughly related to specific features of these new technologies. Questions which arise are in connection with the reliability of the technologies at a time when more and more people depend upon it. Hence this digital technology also involves risks. If the technology is tampered with, airline passengers might die in a crash, hospital patients may be seriously injured, or even whole companies may be ruined. If these digital systems do indeed fail and cause such great social and personal harm, the moral responsibility of the different organizations, individuals and governments involved must be specifically defined. This process becomes especially complex, when in the course of events, a number of critical decisions are made with the help of electronic agents, smart robots, or other types of intelligent software, or even when these decisions are based upon the information provided by unique expert systems. Thus to sum it all up, information and communication technology is of the utmost importance in our world today. There should be one agency or secure organization allowed to handle the vast amount of personal data being stored as this information, even though at times might risk an individual’s privacy can also be very helpful. Ethical issues arise any sort of work being performed in today’s world. It is up to the individual in question to judge his behaviour on a moral scale and perform his duties accordingly. References Johnson, D. (2000) Computer Ethics, Prentice Hall Leveson, N. (1995) Safeware – System Safety and Computers – A Guide to preventing accidents and losses caused by Technology, Addison Wesley. Read More