In ethics-aware engineering, ethical considerations are taken into account across software development life cycle and are integral part of risk assessment and acceptance criteria. The internet became pervasive due to wide spread of broadband & the ubiquity due to proliferation of mobile devices. This raised the issue of social networking such as Facebook, twitter, MySpace, online games (World of war craft) has blurred the boundary between online world & physical world. This digital world proves accessibility of social interaction but also raises several ethical issues like privacy, monitoring, data protection, Cyber Crime, whereas this has been called the dual-use dilemma.
Google maps technology stand argumentative between benefiting people in planning holidays and house hunting while its invasion of privacy and it aid terrorists, thieves in finding their targets easily. Chat rooms such as IRC & MSN which uses peer 2 peer networks allow geographically distant friends to interact, on other hand a place for terrorist to interact from all over the world and pedophiles to take place against kids and public in an amazing way of leading to illegal sexual content over chat rooms. Facebook is the most surprising in ethical issue its undoubtedly a boon to many, assisting them to make new friends and interact with family/friends from all over the world but upon researches its proven that most of students who use Facebook tend to bring lower grade compares to those who don’t use it, Blame goes for developers when designing it they didn’t think well upon the privacy and harms of it.
Ethical Challenges For Software Engineers has highlighted some examples like communication data bill will require ISPs to log all emails and websites access for all users for up to a year where as the key motivation behind this to trace the terrorism activities and illegal use of chat rooms and protection of privacy and to protect copyrights but cutting down the internet after warning on that users who miss use and miss lead the internet because Software engineers would have thought more of right of privacy and the ethical side of an issue before letting users abuse it so developers should be more aware of it !!
Mentioning about if software engineering and ethics mix, obviously developers must strive for ethics path when developing something by thinking of its complexity and what practical challenges can cause and the accountability of it. One of the important paths for developers is thinking of stakeholders for instance who the stakeholders are and identifying their interest and how their system will be used. Some issues can be addressed by better design, some by better testing, some by legislation and some by education of users so developers/soft Eng play a big role in achieving so.
Article source: Awais Rashid, John Weckert, Richard Lucas
