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Legal and ethical issues have become a standard part of engineering and business schools' curricula. This has not been the case for computer science or management information systems programs, although there has been increasing emphasis on the social skills of these students. This leaves a...

This chapter surveys issues and priorities being raised internationally by governments, civil society and the private sector in conceptualizing a global information society. Examinations of social, ethical and policy implications of information and communication technologies are often limited in scope...

This chapter considers the social and ethical significance of digital divides, where a digital divide is taken to be an intra- or international inequality in levels of access to information and communication technologies. The authors argue that digital divides are not necessarily morally objectionable...

What are the potential issues created by the increased access and immediacy offered by information technology? The following chapter suggests how to anticipate these “perils” by applying a conceptual framework, as well as by understanding specific examples and by anticipating future trends....

This chapter deals with the training and education of business personnel about the ethics, manners and responsibilities of e-mail, voicemail, cell phones, and instant messaging, including international etiquette. The author argues for empowering employees by helping them learn to handle these...

This chapter presents an ethical case for strong workplace privacy rights, which have been jeopardized by the proliferation of monitoring systems and surveillance architectures. After explicating the functionality of those technologies and tracing the history of workplace privacy concerns, we analyze...

In traditional communities, some actions are widely regarded as bad and unethical. But in online “communities,” the virtual analog of those actions may not be regarded with the same clarity. Since “virtual” behaviors are distinct from ordinary acts, they require further analysis to determine whether...

This chapter examines the special ethical responsibilities of information systems professionals based on the fundamentals of ethics as commonly understood in the Western world. We start first with principles from religious texts and the codes of ethics included in them. We then examine codes of conduct...

This chapter discusses the influence of technological systems on managing stakeholder relationships in the global environment. The information, immediacy and intimacy—the transparency—afforded by technological networks have transformed the nature and the strategic vantage point of these key...

This chapter reviews the historical, technological and economic factors driving IT organizational design and resulting staffing patterns within the IT organization as a backdrop to reviewing the ethical aspects of outsourcing and other technology-enabled organizational imperatives. It examines the...

While the view that new technology, new ways of doing business and new avenues of communication require new ethical standards is a commonly accepted one, a closer look at the nature of these new developments in juxtaposition with history demonstrates that the notion of new ethics for new eras has been...

This chapter discusses various theories of legal liability related to computer system and data quality. Contract-based theories are discussed in detail, as most computer systems are acquired and data are accessed through some form of contractual relationship. Additional tort-based theories of liability...

This chapter makes the argument that software engineers, as part of a program of moving toward more formal professionalization, should be licensed. It outlines the nature of the profession and the arguments that justify licensing in professions other than software engineering. It then traces the...

This chapter discusses the current state of copyright law with respect to works contained on different media. It traces the history and purpose of the law, while focusing on how digital technology has shaped its evolution. It describes how recent legislation and court cases have created a patchwork of...

This chapter examines rapid technological obsolescence, and the potential impact on retrieval of intellectual creations by future generations. The authors define “intellectual creations” as human expressions embodied in text, music or art. Increasingly, we encode these creations in digital formats that...

This chapter exposes professionals to laws dealing with data management. Both positive and negative aspects of legislation are highlighted. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the reader to some of the more interesting legal issues and provide insight into how information systems professionals and...

The central problem in Cyber Ethics is: how do you establish ethical standards in a professional field that is defined by a rapidly evolving technology where the consequences of the technology and the impact of any ethical standards cannot be known in the time frame in which the standards must be...

Traditionally, uniform and standardised IT-solutions in health care are considered mechanisms for increased control, efficiency and quality. Unfortunately, in spite of existing studies of the actual experiences of standardisation, such as how they come into being, and how they are intertwined with...

Scientific research is hindered when there are artificial barriers preventing efficient and straightforward sharing of bibliographic information. In today’s computing world, the barriers take the form of incompatible bibliographic formats and constraining operating system and vendor dependencies. These...

Open Source Software (OSS) offers programmers the opportunity to elaborate and adapt source code. It is an opportunity to diverge. We would therefore expect incompatible strains of software to develop, and consequently a demand for standardization to arise. However, this is only partly the case. In...

The consortia movement in the standardization world has led to a fragmentation of standardization processes. This fragmentation is partly of a competitive nature, where rival coalitions support competing technologies. A critique on this movement is that it fragments technologies and multiplies the...

Traditionally, conformance testing has been the domain of the telecommunications industry, while interoperability testing has mainly been limited to the Internet world. Many see these as either/or solutions, ignoring the fact that recent experience shows that both approaches have their strengths when...

In the information age, governmental policies in support of innovation are having a growing impact on trade and free market coordination. A balance between innovation and coordination is often achieved by market-sensitive standardization. Governmental policies that interfere with the balance that...

This paper presents the first attempt at analyzing the relationship between strategies to protect intellectual property rights and their impact on the likelihood of joining formal standardization processes, based on a small sample of European companies. On the one hand, theory suggests that the...