School of Engineering and
Applied
Science Department of Computer Science CSci 110 -- Technology and Society http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/csci110/summer08 Prof. Michael B. Feldman, course instructor mfeldman@gwu.edu |
(4-5-page paper, 8 % of your grade, submitted via Blackboard Assignments menu by Friday, 7/18, 11:59 PM EDT)
Purpose: An important
purpose of this course is enable you to
develop analysis skills to make decisions on ethical issues that may
arise related to computer systems that you develop and implement in the
future. An effective way to do that is to analyze hypothetical
situations or scenarios that present ethical dilemma based upon several
criteria. Now that you've had a class discussion on ethics scenarios,
you'll do one on your own.
Assignment: In this
assignment you choose one of the three scenarios
below, to
evaluate in four parts:
Assessment of your paper: Your paper will be graded based upon how well you can support your arguments with carefully stated reasons derived from the philosophical frameworks and the codes of ethics that were presented in class and in the Baase textbook. You are expected to use correct English grammar and spelling. You will be penalized for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, depending upon the severity and frequency of the errors.
Select one of the following three scenarios to analyze:
Scenario 1 -- Software
Reliability: Promises, promises!
A company called GT is building a software platform for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Their whole business model is based upon establishing a trusted marketplace with authentication of all parties. One of the hottest new B2B exchanges, eHotEx.com comes to GT to license their platform. GT finds out that they are also talking to their competitors. Landing this account would be a big PR and revenue coup for GT. As part of the deal, they require some special enhancements to the GT platform. Engineering tells Sales that they can deliver the changes fully tested in 3 months. They will have a beta version ready on 2 months. eHotEx.com indicates that they will accept the beta version and let the bugs get worked out during the release so they can launch on schedule. What should GT do? (From Communications of the ACM, February, 1993)
Scenario 2 -- Privacy:
A software engineer has started her own consulting business. She has been so successful that she now has 10 people working for her and a number of excellent clients. Their consulting work included advising on how to put together networks, how to design database management systems, and how to provide network security. Presently she is designing a database system for the personnel office of a medium-sized company. She has involved the client in the design process, informing the CEO, the director of I'T, and the director of personnel about the progress of the system. It is now time to make decisions about the kind and extent of the security to build in to the system. She has described several options to the client. Because the system is going to cost more than they planned, the client has decided to opt for a less secure system. The software engineer believes that the data they will be storing is extremely sensitive personnel information, such as performance evaluations, salary data, medical records for insurance filings, and so on. With weak security, it may be possible for company employees to gain access to this data as well as for hackers to break into it. She feels strongly that the system should be much more secure. She tries to explain the risks, but the CEO and his staff all agree that the less expensive, less secure solution will be fine. What should she do? (From Communications of the ACM, February, 1993)
Scenario 3 -- Intellectual
Property:
A programmer, working on a sophisticated
data mining package, is trying to write an algorithm to do intelligent
searches across multiple databases. Programmers in this company are
encouraged to write about their work and publish their algorithms in
professional journals. After months of tedious programming, the
programmer finds himself stuck on one part of the problem. His manager,
not realizing the complexity of the problem, wants the job completed
within the next few days. The programmer remembers that a co-worker had
written an article about a similar problem and given him the source
code from an earlier version of a commercial software package developed
by another company. On looking at those programs, he sees two areas of
code that could be incorporated into his program. He incorporates the
segments of code from the co-worker's article and from the commercial
package into the program, but does not tell anyone or mention it in the
documentation. The program works perfectly and is delivered a day ahead
of schedule.
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