COMPUTER ETHICS
Abstract : Computer ethics is how people use a computer with following the real rules that normally still has no boundary because of unreal world. This journal contain about what does the problem created by computer technology, the connection between ethics and some rules about computer ethics with no real boundary that is implemented.
When computers being invented, it generated a complex social, ethical, and value concerns. Computer technology evolves and gets deployed in new ways that make new issue about privacy, property rights, accountability, and social value. Computer is used in the first time for military to coordinating their target. In the shadow of the Second World War, the computer concern change to governments to make centralize and concentrate power. These concerns accompanied the expanding use of computers for record-keeping and the exponential growth in scale of databses, allowing the creation, maintenance, and manipulation of huge quantities of personal information. This was followed by the inception of software control system and video games, raising issues of accountability-liability and property rights. This evoltion of computer technology can be followed through to more recent developments including the internet, simulation and imaging technologies, and virtual reality systems. Each one of these developments was accompanied by conceptual and moral uncertainty. Ethical issues arise in real-world contexts and texts in which computers are used. Each context has different issues, and if we ignore this context we miss important part of computer ethical issues.
The connection between technology and ethics
Techonology is develop by human to make something that before it created or invented we can’t do it but when it happen we can. It is also that we can do the same sorts of things we did before but in new ways. As a result of technology, we can travel, work, keep records, be entertained, comminicate, and engage in warfare in new ways. When we engage in these activities using computer technology, our actions have different properties, properties that may change the character of the activity or action-type.
Computer technology instruments human action in ways that turn very simple movements into very powerful actions. The technology has instrumented an action not possible without it. This is the first step in understanding the connection between computer technology and ethics is to acknowledge how intimate the connection between technology and human action can be. The second step is connect human action to ethics. Computer technology changes the domain of human action.
The involvement of computer technology has moral significance for several reasons. Technology creates new possibilities for human action and this means that human being face ethical question they never faced before. In the case of computer technology, is it wrong to monitor keystrokes of employees who are using computers ? To place cookies on computers when the computers are used to visit a website ? To combine separate pieces of personal data into a single comprehensive portfolio of a person ?
Ethics for computer
In an information society, a large number of individuals are educated for and employed in jobs that invlove development, maintenance, buying and selling, and use of computer and information technology. Expertise in computing can be deployed recklessly or cautiously, used for good or evil, and the organization of information technology experts into occupations/professions is an important social means of managing that expertise in ways that serve human well-being.
Recognizing that justification of social responsibilities of computer experts is connected to more general notions of duty and responsibility, computer ethicists have drawn on a variety of traditional philosophical concepts and theories, but especially social contract theory. Notice that the connection between being a computer expert and having a duty to deploy that expertise for good of humanity cannot be explained simply as a causal relationship.
At least one computer ethicist has gone so far as to argue that the central task of the field of computer ethics is work out issues of professionals for computer professionals. Gotterbarn (1995: 21) writes that the “only way to make sense of ‘Computer Ethics’ is to narrow its focus to those actions that are within the control of the individual moral computer professional.”
Privacy
In an information society privacy is a major concern in that much of the information gathered and processed is information about individuals. Computer technology makes possible a previously unimaginable magnitude of data collection, storage, retention, and exchange. Computer technology made information collection a built-in feature of many activities.
Cybercrime and abuse
While the threats to privacy described arise from uses of computer and information technology, other threats arise from abuses. As individuals and companies do more and more electronically, their privacy and property rights become ever more important, and these rights are sometimes threatened by individuals who defy the law or test its limits. Such individuals may seek personal gain or may just enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to crack security mechanisms. They are often called hackers or crackers. The term hacker used to refer to individuals who simply loved the challenge of working on programs and figuring out how to do complex things with computers, but did not necessary break the law. Crackers were those who broke law. The term are now used somewhat interchangeably to refer to those who engage in criminal activity.
Internet issues
The internet is the most powerful technology development of the late twentieth century. The internet brings together many industries, but especially the computer, telecomunications, and media enterprises. It brings together and provides a forum for millions of individuals and businesses around the world. The development of the internet has involving moving many basic social institutions from paper and ink medium to the electronic medium.
The internet have three features that make it unusual or special. First, it has an unusual scope in that it provides many-to-may communication on global scale. Of course, television and radio as well as the telephone are global in scale, but television and radio are one-to-many forms of communication, and the telephone, which is many-to-many, is expensive and more difficult to use. With the internet, individuals and companies can have much more frequent communication with one another, in real time, at relatively low cost, with case and with visual as well as sound component. Second, the internet facilities a certain kind of anonymity. One can communicate extensively with individuals across the globe, using pseudonyms or real identities, and yet one never has encounter the other face-to-face. This type of anonymity affects the content and nature of communication that takes place on the internet. Third, the internet is its reproducibility. When put on the internet, text, software, music, and video can be duplicated. They can also be altered with ease. The reproducibility of the medium means that all actovity on the internet is recorded and can be traced.
Positive side
•Bring people closer together.
•Removing bariers based on physical appearance.
•Reproducibility facilitates.
Negative Side
•Launched viruses.
•Distrub communication.
•Multiple identities.
•Threatens privacy and property rights.
Virtual Reality
One of the most philosophically capacities of computer technology is “virtual reality system.” These are system that graphically and aurally represent environments into which individuals can project themselves and interact. Virtual environments can be designed to represent real-life situations and then used to train individuals for those environments. They can also be designed to do just the oppsite, that is to create environments with features radically different from the real world. The meaning of actions in virtual reality is what is at stake as well as the moral accountability of individual behavior in virtual systems. When one acts in virtual systems one “does” something, though it is not the action represented. Actions in virtual systems can have real-world consequences.
The ten commandment of computer ethics
1) User shall not use a computer to harm other people: If it is unethical to harm people by making a bomb, for example, it is equally bad to write a program that handles the timing of the bomb. Or, to put it more simply, if it is bad to steal and destroy other people’s books and notebooks, it is equally bad to access and destroy their files.
2) User shall not interfere with other people's computer work: Computer viruses are small programs that disrupt other people’s computer work by destroying their files, taking huge amounts of computer time or memory, or by simply displaying annoying messages. Generating and consciously spreading computer viruses is unethical.
3) User shall not snoop around in other people's files: Reading other people’s e-mail messages is as bad as opening and reading their letters: This is invading their privacy. Obtaining other people’s non-public files should be judged the same way as breaking into their rooms and stealing their documents. Text documents on the Internet may be protected by encryption.
4) User shall not use a computer to steal: Using a computer to break into the accounts of a company or a bank and transferring money should be judged the same way as robbery. It is illegal and there are strict laws against it.
5) User shall not use a computer to bear false witness: The Internet can spread untruth as fast as it can spread truth. Putting out false "information" to the world is bad. For instance, spreading false rumors about a person or false propaganda about historical events is wrong.
6) User shall not use or copy software for which you have not paid: Software is an intellectual product. In that way, it is like a book: Obtaining illegal copies of copyrighted software is as bad as photocopying a copyrighted book. There are laws against both. Information about the copyright owner can be embedded by a process called watermarking into pictures in the digital format.
7) User shall not use other people's computer resources without authorization: Multiuser systems use user id’s and passwords to enforce their memory and time allocations, and to safeguard information. You should not try to bypass this authorization system. Hacking a system to break and bypass the authorization is unethical.
8) User shall not appropriate other people's intellectual output: For example, the programs you write for the projects assigned in this course are your own intellectual output. Copying somebody else’s program without proper authorization is software piracy and is unethical. Intellectual property is a form of ownership, and may be protected by copyright laws.
9) User shall think about the social consequences of the program you write: You have to think about computer issues in a more general social framework: Can the program you write be used in a way that is harmful to society? For example, if you are working for an animation house, and are producing animated films for children, you are responsible for their contents. Do the animations include scenes that can be harmful to children? In the United States, the Communications Decency Act was an attempt by lawmakers to ban certain types of content from Internet websites to protect young children from harmful material. That law was struck down because it violated the free speech principles in that country's constitution. The discussion, of course, is going on.
10) User shall use a computer in ways that show consideration and respect: Just like public buses or banks, people using computer communications systems may find themselves in situations where there is some form of queuing and you have to wait for your turn and generally be nice to other people in the environment. The fact that you cannot see the people you are interacting with does not mean that you can be rude to them.
Conclusion
Computer ethics has to be made with a good boundary that write down the limition that must not be broke by computer users. The consequence must be receive for those who break it. By creating a good computer ethics the users can know which one is the limit that cannot be pass by.
References
http://www.geocities.com/lool95/
http://books.google.com/books?hl=id&lr=&id=rIbJJOjoqygC&oi=fnd&pg=PA65&dq=Computing+Ethics+jurnal&ots=T8utE6aVTP&sig=zjLRbsRA-ypymLe8fTfvc1Pr8v0#PPA67,M1
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