Chapter 15 • Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues 579on book publishers. Traditional journalism, where reporters
are trained to verify facts and avoid bias, is giving way to
blogs and opinionated programs masquerading as news.
News programs that attempt to adhere to traditional journal-
istic values are losing viewers to overtly biased cable chan-
nels that appeal to specific population groups, and the most
popular hosts are those who shout the loudest and are the
most opinionated. If one believes that a successful democ-
racy depends upon an electorate that is well informed about
the issues, what do these trends portend for our future?
It would require an entire book to do justice to the
social, legal, and ethical issues in IT, so we are limited in
the number of topics and the depth of coverage of these
topics. We have chosen to cover the following three issues
in some depth: privacy, identity theft, and intellectual prop-
erty rights. Then we briefly introduce the topics of access
to the technology, freedom of speech, the hazards of inac-
curacy, and the impact on workers.
Some social issues are important because managers
must be aware of them and make sure that these activities
are not going on in the workplace. However, they are not
central to the management of IT, so for space reasons they
are not included in this chapter. These omitted topics include
hate e-mail, cyberstalking, sexual abuse via the Internet, and
pornography. An employee might harass others via hate
e-mail. Cyberstalking is the use of the Internet, e-mail, or
other electronic communications devices to stalk another
person. Employees can be sexual predators who are contact-
ing minors through chat rooms using company facilities.
And employees might use their office computers to access
pornography while at work. These activities might subject
the organization to significant penalties as well as public
embarrassment, so it behooves prudent managers to make
sure that they do not occur in their area of responsibility.
Privacy
Privacy is important to people, but it is a difficult concept
to define. Violating your privacy can relate to unwanted
access to your person, or to intruding into your home or
office, or to observing you, or to obtaining information
about you. We would like to think that we have a “right”
to privacy, but legally that right is much weaker than prop-
erty rights or the right to free speech.
As a legal right, privacywas defined by Samuel D.
Warren and Louis D. Brandeis in 1890 as “the right to be
let alone.” However, this broad right has not been enacted
into law in the United States.
In our discussion, we will define privacy as the ability
to control access to information about ourselves. Control is
a key word in this definition because there is information
about us that we willingly share with family, or friends, or
those we trust, but that we would not want to share with the
general public. Note that there is information about us—
public information—to which we cannot control access.
And there is critical information about us, such as social
security numbers in the United States, that by law we must
provide to financial institutions so that income can be
reported to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This is
another instance of why the concept of control is so impor-
tant, for we want to be able to keep our social security
number away from potential identity thieves.
A person might give up his or her claim to privacy by
giving permission to collect and use certain personal infor-
mation. Therefore, if, after fully informing a person of how
the information is to be used, you receive the person’s per-
mission to obtain and use personal information, you are
not invading that person’s privacy. People routinely give up
personal information to someone they trust in exchange for
some benefit or in order to transact business. However, pri-
vacy has been invaded when that information is used in
ways that the person never intended or agreed to.Privacy Problems
It is clear that IT has radically affected our ability to control
access to information about ourselves and thus presents seri-
ous privacy problems. Before the computer, when transac-
tions and records were on paper, there was quite limited
access even to public information about ourselves. To find
information someone had to go to where it was located, find
it in the file, and copy it down. However, it was also difficult
to keep track of who had accessed it. Today, when the same
information is in an online database accessible via the
Internet, it can be obtained from anywhere in the world in a
few seconds and at no cost unless the appropriate security
controls are in effect. That ability has provided an enormous
boost to productivity in our economy, but without substan-
tial safeguards, it can devastate our personal privacy. The
Internet has therefore enormously magnified the privacy
problem, because once electronic information is captured, it
may be copied and made available in numerous other places.
Explosive growth of the use of IT has produced a situa-
tion where huge amounts of personal information are easily
available without any need for criminal activities. For reasons
of convenience and efficiency, government agencies are put-
ting official records into online databases—birth and death
records, marriages, divorces, property sales, business licenses,
legal proceedings, driving records, and so on. Furthermore,
personal information is valuable for marketing purposes, and
there are data brokers whose business is to collect and sell
such information to whomever wishes to purchase it.
In the normal activities of transacting business, we
often must provide sensitive personal information such as