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Chapter 08
Ethics and Technology
True / False Questions
1. Workplace technology has changed dramatically over the last two decades.
2. Companies can now make vast amounts of information available to its employees and
customers on their Internet, intranet, and extranet sites.
3. The intranet is a private piece of a company's Internet network that is made available to
customers and/or vendor partners on the basis of secured access by a unique password.
4. The extranet is a part of a company's website which can only be accessed by its senior
executives.
5. Technological advances over the last two decades have made it more difficult to pass the
personal data of customers from one place to another.
6. Technological advances over the last two decades have made it possible for some
employers to read the personal e-mails that employees send from their workstations.
7. One of the ways in which multinational corporations lower their expenses is by shipping
work to countries with lower labor costs.
8. Information, once digitized, cannot be sent over a fiber-optic cable.
9. Customer service call centers and computer tech support are examples of services that
cannot be outsourced to another country.
10. Sending digitized information across fiber-optic wires raises no ethical questions.
11. Employers feel it necessary to monitor employees at the workplace because they have an
obligation to their stakeholders to operate as efficiently as possible.
12. From an employer's perspective, monitoring an employee's computer activity at the
workplace is necessary to map their productivity during work hours.
13. The availability of ongoing technological advancements has made it easier to determine
precisely where work ends and personal life begins.
14. The argument over privacy at work traditionally centered on the amount of time that
employees were on-site.
15. The new technological capability that allows employees to work from locations other than
their office and log into their company's network remotely is known as telecommuting.
16. Telecommuting does not allow employees any degree of flexibility in terms of the location
from which they work.
17. The concept of "at work" has become blurred because of the advances in computer
technology and the new capability of telecommuting.
18. With advances in technology, the availability of employees in the business environment is
no longer defined by their accessibility.
19. Advances in technology make it harder for employers to assign work to their employees
outside the workplace.
20. According to Adam Moore, consent given by employees with little choice is referred to as
thick consent.
21. Thin consent leaves employees with little choice regarding the monitoring of their web
activity at the workplace.
22. Thin consent is based on the assumption that the employee can easily find another job.
23. When jobs are plentiful and an employee would have no difficulty finding another
position, then the consent given to the monitoring policy of a company is referred to as thin
consent.
24. One of the arguments cited by employers for the use of web-monitoring at the workplace
is the concept of vicarious liability.
25. Vicarious liability is a legal concept that means a party may be held responsible for injury
or damage only if he or she were actively involved in an incident.
26. Parties charged with vicarious liability are never in a supervisory role over the person or
parties personally responsible for the injury or damage.
27. The implications of vicarious liability are that the party charged is responsible for the
actions of his or her subordinates.
28. Parents can be charged with vicarious liability for the actions of their children.
29. According to the legal concept of cyberliability, employers can be held liable for the
actions of their employees through Internet communications to the same degree as if they had
written those communications on company letterhead.
30. Cyberliability applies the existing legal concept of liability to the field of computers.
31. Cyberliability results in litigation for harassment through spam, obscenity, and
pornography.
32. The categories of litigation for cyberliability extend to defamation and libel.
33. With employers being able to monitor every keystroke on a computer, track every website
visited, and record every call made by employees, the workplace is beginning to display Orwellian
characteristics.
34. Copying and distributing unpaid proprietary software is not a violation of computer
ethics.
35. Using a computer to appropriate the intellectual output of another person is an example
of ethical employee behavior.
36. Computer ethics extends to considering the social consequences of the program being
written and ensuring that your work doesn't harm people.
37. Employee turnover, a long-term effect of monitoring employees, costs organizations
thousands of dollars in recruitment costs and training.
8-13
38. Packet-sniffing software can be used to monitor employees' private accounts, as long as
they are accessed on workplace networks or phone lines.
39. Keystroke loggers can only capture information that is not deleted.
40. Video surveillance, under federal law, is acceptable where the camera focuses on publicly
accessible areas.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 1 Easy
Learning Objective: 08-05 Analyze an organization's employee-surveillance capabilities.
Multiple Choice Questions
41. Which of the following statements is true of the advances in workplace technology over
the last two decades?
42. The term _____ refers to a company's internal website that contains information for
employee access only.
43. Emily, a website designer, is hired by an organization to create an internal website that
contains information meant to be accessed solely by employees. This website is the company's
_____.
44. The term _____ refers to a private piece of a company's Internet network that is made
available to customers and/or vendor partners on the basis of secured access by unique
password.
45. Jordan, a software engineer, is responsible for maintaining the private piece of his
company's internet network that is accessible to clients by means of a unique password. This
piece of the company's network is known as the _____.
46. Companies can make vast amounts of information available to customers through their
_____ sites.
47. Which of the following is a disadvantage of technological advances in a workplace?
48. Information can be digitized and transmitted over fiber-optic cables because of the recent
advances in technology. What implications does this have?
49. The advances in technology have affected customers in a way that:
50. Information can be digitized and transmitted over fiber-optic cables because of the recent
advances in technology. Which ethical obligation of this new capability is now being realized?
51. Resolving the different perspectives on the issue of monitoring employee activity is
difficult because:
