Ethical Issues Computers

I am of the view that ethics is a branch of philosophy which deals with what is considered to be right or wrong. Dictionary.com defines ethics as “that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.” Although there are many definitions of ethics which have been widely proposed, such as codes of morals for a specific profession, research for computer ethics has been launched for the sole purpose of examining what is right and wrong for Internet users, its social effects, privacy, intellectual property, electronic communication, e-commerce, computer abuse and such the like. Too put it in more simple words, it is the study of what is right to do in a given situation and what we ought to do.

I want to state for the record that it is important to note that what is unethical is not necessary illegal. With this being said, many individuals and organizations are faced with these common ethical problems. Can you imagine what will your life be if you had never touch a computer in the 21st century? This is a hard to imagine because everything now a day is basically a computer. But it is a reality that many countries because of their geographical location pose the problem of not having access to the internet and computer, this discrepancy poises another problem because these countries will be left behind and there population will not be ready to today’s job market.

Although these countries will be left behind, countries with these advance technologies are faced with new challenges such as ethical computing. Such behaviors are people using the computers to commit crime, implementing viruses, commit identity theft, illegally sharing copyrighted material or the most famous one schools monitoring students through the use of the schools notebook computer webcam without the student knowledge.

With the advance of computer technology, it is important to understand computer ethics related to security, privacy issues, and major negative impacts of Information Technology. Strategies must be developed to address this growing number of ethical behavior. Moreover, we must realize that information technology plays an integral part in commerce, industries, government, medicine, education, entertainment and society at large. In computer ethics, harmful actions means injury or negative consequences, such as undesirable loss of information, loss of property damage, or unwanted environmental impacts. Harmful actions include intentional destruction or modification of files and programs leading to serious loss of resources and unnecessary expenditure of human resources.