The Scenarios:
- When purchasing
a computer at BB the sales associate tells you that there is no need to
buy virus protection because you can download trial versions at
virusprotection.com at no cost.
When the trial period expires, just download a new version. When you question whether or not this is
ethical, he replies: “Ethics are defined by society and society says this
is acceptable or the software wouldn’t be there to download.” NOTE:
The quote above may not be exact, but it is really close. What should you do?
- Leave
the store and buy your computer elsewhere, but do nothing else.
- Buy
the computer anyway. After all,
you can’t change the way people think.
- Report
the employee to the management of BB and suggest they offer a workshop in
Computer Ethics for their sales associates.
- Report
the employee to virusprotection.com, knowing that they may remove the
software from their website leaving people unable to try their product.
- Report
the employee to both the management of BB and to virusprotection.com
- A
different solution …
- All
computers at your school are required to have the school logo as a
background. This logo is gray on a
bright white background and difficult on many people’s vision (headaches
and even migraines have been reported).
The school technical support staff is made aware
of the situation, but insist that the logo must stay on the
desktop, despite the problem. A
member of the Computer Science department knows a way around the problem
by hacking into each individual PC and offers to help his colleagues do
this, even though this is a clear violation of school policy. What should you do?
- Report
your colleague to the technical support staff.
- Allow
your colleague to violate school policy since it is in the best interest
(and health) of other colleagues.
- Voice
your concern to your department head and leave it at that.
- Voice
your concern to the Dean and try to get the policy changed. Keep in mind the Dean recently
experienced the death of her spouse and is just returning to work.
- A
different solution …
- A
“security expert” for a midsize company is in charge of making sure the
corporate database is secure from hackers.
To achieve this task, he is assigned the job of trying to hack into
the system. While doing this job,
he discovers a colleague has left open several “back doors” to secure
systems to make his personal access to the systems (which he is entitled
to) significantly easier. Because
these back doors would also allow anyone who hacks the colleagues
machine access to the secure servers, they are a clear violation of
corporate policy. What should the
security expert do? NOTE: The ‘back door” enabled the colleague to
access all of the servers without having to enter a user name and
password.
- Nothing,
they all work for the same company.
- Report
the breach of security to the head of IS, know that the person may be
reprimanded.
- Close
the portal and say nothing.
- Close
the portal and talk with the employee who violated security.
- A
different solution …