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Ethics In IT
chiefloko writes "I am presently taking a Business Ethics class while earning my MBA. For my final paper topic I have chosen 'Ethics within the Information Technology realm.' Over the past 13 years I have worked for three corporations and have seen everything from the typical BOFH to ungodly pirated software use. I also bore witness to a remote user logging in to a poorly administrated Sun station, finding out s/he was root, and then reading co-workers' emails. I am interested in what the norm is for ethics in the IT world and some of the stories and outcomes."
Whose ehics are you talking about?
The Ethics of an MBA giving IT orders, the ethics of a BOFH doing his job, the ethics of a developer?
Let's not speak of Joe Average consumer of IT as he actually has no IT Ethics, he applies his Ethical viewpoint to IT so his inclusion will only muddle up the concepts.
Each of these communities (PHB, BOFH, Developers) has their own ethical codes (or lack of). While there is a great difference between them, there are not that many differences between members of a particular caste.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Cover Your Ass. That's it, that's all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Irrespective of if it's IT related. You shouldn't do anything you wouldn't want done to yourself or is likely to hurt people. Just be a decent honest person.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I think a better approach is do unto others as you think they would want done to them
That helps avoid the "well, I'd want to be killed if I was gay" rationale...
Anything that isn't prohibited is not only allowed, but also ethical.
There may be some truth in that, but I don't see how that applies to interpersonal behaviour. My own preference is to defer to what my grandmother taught me: ethics is insisting on doing what's right even when no one is looking.
She also taught me to the principle of keeping things simple, both from a moral perspective and practical one. I never asked, but I'm sure she preferred vi to emacs.
When I was a general manager, one of my policies was always to pay the small suppliers promptly, because they need it most. That's not only ethics, it is simple common sense.
It is interesting that one of the most developed business environments in the world -that little region that includes Northern Italy, Switzerland, parts of South Germany and South-East France - relies heavily on networks of trust. I have sealed the deal there more than once with no paperwork and a handshake. I suspect that the reason that "Business ethics" needs to be taught in an MBA class is because many new graduates have fantasies of the ruthless corporate world based on Hollywood and computer games, and they need to be made a little safer before they can get out and cause their companies serious damage.
The fact that some CEOs are psychopaths should not blind us to the fact that most are not.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Access are for the things that you never should be able to touch. Audit seems to be working quite well for the rest. This doesn't work quite well in the sysadmin example where he can go in and read the files directly, but it's very effective in most systems where you have to go through a regular interface. I know for example banks have used that for operators that like to peek at famous people's bank accounts. Another example that I know personally is passing through project gates - the access controls are quite loose, but of course you're supposed to go up to a review meeting and actually pass the gate. There's an audit log to tell who said they had passed the gate and when, and it's not going to be pretty if they find you're bluffing.
People don't handle temptation all that well. If you put a normally honest person in a position where he could very easily and with little risk where he could do something wrong, he might do it. If it looks hard, he'll think long and hard before doing anything. If it requires a conspiracy, he almost certainly won't do it. So I'd say the solution isn't to try to limit everything up front, just make them fear that someone will peek them in the cards later.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Often this is for cultural or even legal reasons: for example, in Holland it's forbidden by law in a company to check the web access logs for an employee unless there is reason to believe that employee is misusing the company resources or doing something illegal, while in the UK an employee can expect that anything done via the company network will be watched.
The main differences that affect the actions of people in a position of power in an IT environment and in an equivalent non-IT environment are:
Sorry, we do not believe in Imaginary Property here. There is nothing "ungodly" about "pirated", because pirating is not exactly the same as stealing.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
One of the interesting ethics issues I have seen at most of the places I have worked is how the typical person is treated versus how the executive is treated.
The typical person calls the Help Desk, gets a level 1 person who reads scripts and then if they can't help it gets escalated. If the problem is severe they might try to remote control the computer, etc. It is also, in most places I have worked, expressly forbidden to work on home machines due to liability factors (if you destroy their data for instance, catch porn on a personal computer, etc).
However, with executives they generally have a special number or person to call, they frequently have non-standard hardware/software, have people going to their house for support, etc.
In general they can get away with abusing the system and its resources. The interesting thing here is that if you talk to a lot of people in IT they have split views on whether this is ok or not. Some think that it is an executive perk. Others think it is an abuse of system resources. Others, like myself, think it gives executives a flawed view of IT (even if the typical user is getting horrid service, the executives don't see it and do not correct the issue - because it is working perfectly for them).
I think an issue like this is not as clear cut, but I'm curious to see what other people think of the same sort of thing in their company.
We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these two things:
#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.
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That's about the ethics my teachers had when I started to learning system administration 15 years ago and this is what I'm still educating people new to this about. I never met a good admin who wouldn't passionately subscribe to this.
k2r
Far too often, companies consider business ethics to == "not doing things that will get the company into trouble."
Particularly with the advent of outsourcing, those who work in IT are selling trust more than skill. That's why abuse of power by IT folks should be dealt with harshly and swiftly when detected.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
As another student of ethics (although my my course in religious ethics was extremely one-sided, I've taken intro to ethics and am currently taking an environmental ethics course), I agree completely. One of our biggest problems as a society is that we overwhelmingly tend toward dogmatism, and dogmatism is a Bad Thing no matter what side you're on because it prevents everyone involved from actually thinking or coming to rational decisions; stem cells are a great example of everybody involved simply failing to listen at all, choosing instead to call each other baby-killers or idiots respectively (and not respectfully), and both sides have done a great disservice to their cause by letting it come to that.
The key is (as parent I'm sure already knows) is to ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT IT. On virtually every issue, two moral, ethical individuals can come to well reasoned and ethically defensible positions which are completely opposed to one another, and neither of them actually has to be wrong; but if they are both honest, then they could have a serious and possibly even productive discussion about what can be done to make both of them happy. A symptom of our culture of dogmatism is that the word "compromise" has become a synonym for "selling out" or "giving up", and that politicians and activists receive criticism if they actually do it.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Lol.. You shouldn't have posted this as AC.
I think too many people dwell on the word nigger which in and of itself has no power outside what people give it. Also, according to the definitions I was raised with, nigger doesn't really mean black, but a type of person who does certain things.
Few people realize that the word nigger is more or less a bastardization of the word Niger which is a territory/country in Africa that exists to this day. When the slave trade was coming to the US, the tribes had chased all the other tribe back past the Nigerian and Niger rivers into a french territory called Niger before capturing them. When you ship property, there is a point of origin and destination on the bill of lading and some dumbfuck hooked on phonics southerner pronounced niger as nigger and because most communications were oral, it stuck.
but regardless of it's origin, the fact that people let words define who they are is amazing when it comes to this. The racists use the word because they know it pisses people off. It is really no different then juveniles taking up swear words in an effort to piss their elders off. Unfortunately, instead of dealing with it as a word with many meaning, we have concentrated on the negatives associated with it and placed it off limits because of how we have reinforced the negetive meaning. To a racist, it has no meaning other then pissing blacks off, we gave that to them and let them define it's value by teaching the youths to react in a certain way to it. Racist on the other side have tried to do the same with creating words like Cracker and honky but unlike nigger, it only holds a specific meaning in their circle so it doesn't have the impact that nigger does.
Anyways, the point of chiming in, is to mention that the AC is right in that nigger doesn't mean black people, the modern definition doesn't even seem to mention them. And the only reason it has any power is because we let it have it. Either as a society who has tagged it as the "ultimate offense" or as a people who will let it trigger emotions and actions and in effect playing into the users motives. Hate often is designed to hurt others, when they can do it arbitrarily with words, those that hate become very effective. That's why "hate crimes" is a joke. It empowers those that hate.
Why didn't you give a rationale along with the instruction? A lot of people will do stuff when they know why.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
"There's no such thing as business ethics. There are only ethics, you either have them or you don't."
And in the business world, the "fittest" is often whomever is most willing to do whatever it takes, and stop over whomever they can, to achieve the goal.