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DISCUSSION
4. What role can and should employers play in limiting (perhaps eliminating) sexting in the
workplace? What about employee-to-employee sexting? What about employee-to–
customer sexting? Regarding the latter, what sort of legal liability does an organization
have if an employee sends an unwanted and unwelcome sext to another employee or
customer?
5. These are purely for you to answer. Have you ever participated in sexting? Have you
received a sext? Has learning more about ethics and the non-privacy of technology-
enabled communications reshaped your thinking about participating in questionable
activities like sexting?
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CLOSING CASE STUDY TWO (p. 252)
Sony Reels from Multiple Hacker Attacks
This is a well-known case study of hacking. Your students will probably have been impacted by
this from a customer/player point of view.
QUESTIONS
1. Do some research on the Sony PSN debacle. What are the new cost estimates for the
incident? How many customers have left Sony because of the incident? Have there been
any reports of fraudulent use of identities obtained from the hack? Has Sony’s PlayStation
Network been hacked again?
2. Gaming and virtual services on the Internet, like Sony’s PSN, World of Warcraft, and Second
Life, boast millions of users. For each user, the service must store credit card information
and personally identifiable information. What must these organizations do to protect the
private information of their customers? Is it even reasonable to assume that any
organization can have protection measures in place to stop the world’s best hackers?
DISCUSSION
• Organizations storing personal and credit card information must go to great lengths to
3. If an extremely intelligent hacker is caught by a law enforcement agency, should that hacker
be prosecuted and sent to jail? Is there perhaps a way that hacker might be “turned” for
the good of the digital world? What would that be?
DISCUSSION
4. According to each and every survey taken of businesses regarding data breaches, each one
states that many businesses are reluctant to publicly announce a data breach. Further,
most businesses will downplay the significance of the breach. Why do organizations do
this? What is there to gain by not operating in a transparent fashion? Is this an ethical
issue, a legal issue, or both?
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DISCUSSION
5. What’s your personal identity theft story? Has someone used your credit card fraudulently?
How many phishing e-mails have you received in the last year? How often do you check
your credit report?
DISCUSSION
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SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS (p. 251)
1. What are ethics and how do ethics apply to business?
2. What situation would qualify as an exception to the copyright rule?
3. What is privacy?
4. What is pirated software?
5. What is identity theft?
6. What does a key logger do?
7. What is spyware?
8. What is a denial of service attack?
9. What is public key encryption?
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ASSIGNMENTS & EXERCISES (p. 251)
1. HELPING A FRIEND. Suppose you fully intend to spend the evening working on an Excel
assignment that’s due the next day. Then a friend calls. Your friend is stranded miles from
home and desperately needs your help. It will take most of the evening to pick up your
friend, bring him home, and return to your studying. Not only that, but you’re very tired
when you get home and just fall into bed. The next day your friend, who completed his
assignment earlier, suggests you just make a copy, put your own name on the cover, and
hand it in as your own work. Should you do it? Isn’t it only fair that since you helped your
friend, the friend should do something about making sure you don’t lose points because
of your generosity? What if your friend promises not to hand in his or her own work so
that you can’t be accused of copying? Your friend wrote the assignment and gave it to you
so there’s no question of copyright infringement.
DISCUSSION
• The scenario is intended to differentiate copyright infringement from fraud
2. FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED. In December 2001, British Telecom (BT) has filed a lawsuit
against Prodigy in New York federal court, claiming it owns the hyperlinking process. If BT
wins this lawsuit then the company will be able to collect licensing revenue from the 100
billion or so links on the Web. BT has a patent that it says amounts to ownership of the
hyperlinking process. Prodigy (and everyone else in the world) stores Web pages with a
displayed part, which the browser shows, and a hidden part that the viewer doesn’t see,
and which contains hidden information including the addresses that are used by the
displayed portion. This, BT said is the essence of its U.S. patent No. 4,873,662. In
reference to this case, answer the following questions:
a. Has a ruling been handed down on this matter yet? If so, what was the result?
b. If any kind of hyperlinking is, in fact, the essence of the patent held by BT, what about
library card catalogs, are they infringements too? Why or why not? What else could
be?
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DISCUSSION
3. INVESTIGATE MONITORING SYSTEMS The text listed several monitoring systems, other
systems that defeat them, and e-mail encryption program. Find two more of the
following:
a. programs that monitor keyboard activity
b. programs that find keyboard monitoring programs
c. e-mail encryption programs.
DISCUSSION
Following are some examples
4. CHECK OUT COMPUTER ETHICS INSTITUTE’S ADVICE. The Computer Ethics Institutes Web site
at http://computerethicsinstitute.org/images/TheTenCommandmentsOfComputerEthics.pdf offers
the “Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics” to guide you in the general direction of ethical
computer use. The first two are:
• Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people. This one is the bedrock for all
the others.
• Thou shalt not interfere with other people’s computer work. This one includes small
sins like sending frivolous e-mail, big ones, like spreading viruses, and the really big
ones like electronic stalking.
Look up the other eight and give at least two examples of acts that would be in violation of
these guidelines.
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DISCUSSION
• The wording, or even the intent of the commandments may vary since there are
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (p. 254)
1. When selling antiques, you can usually obtain a higher price for those that have a
provenance, which is information detailing the origin and history of the object. For
example, the property owned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana sold for
much more than face value. What kinds of products have value over and above a
comparable product because of such information? What kind of information makes
products valuable? Consider both tangible (resale value) and intangible value (sentimental
appeal).
DISCUSSION
• Objects have value over and above the value of something comparable because of
who made the artifact or who owned it.
2. Personal checks that you use to buy merchandise have a standard format. Checks have
very few different sizes, and almost no variation in format. Consider what would happen if
everyone could create his or her own size, shape, and layout of personal check. What
would the costs and benefits be to business and the consumer in terms of buying checks,
exchanging them for merchandise, and bank check processing?
DISCUSSION
• The reason for the standard format is so that everyone knows where to look for the
• payee, the date, the amount, and the signature. This saves time in writing and
3. Consider society as a business that takes steps to protect itself from the harm of illegal
acts. Discuss the mechanisms and costs that are involved. Examine ways in which our
society would be different if no one ever broke a law. Are there ever benefits to our
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society when people break the law — for example, when they claim that the law itself is
unethical or unjust?
DISCUSSION
• The cost of crime can be expressed in both tangible and intangible terms.
• The tangible costs include the cost to the victim of theft or injury, the cost to
4. Can you access all the IT systems at your college or university? What about payroll or
grade information on yourself or others? What kinds of controls has your college or
university implemented to prevent the misuse of information
DISCUSSION
• It’s very unlikely that students are able to access payroll or grade information on
5. You know that you generally can’t use a PC to access the information stored on a
Macintosh formatted disk. What other instances of the lack of difficulty in accessing
information have you experienced personally or heard of? For example, have you used
different versions of MS PowerPoint or MS Access that won’t work on all the PCs that you
have access to?
DISCUSSION
6. Have you, or someone you know, experienced computer problems caused by a virus?
What did the virus do? Where do you think you got it? How did you fix the problem? What
was the cost to you in time, trouble, and stress?
DISCUSSION
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7. What laws do you think the United States should pass to protect personal information?
None? Laws such as the EU has? Stricter laws than the European Union? Why? Should
some personal information be more protected than other information? Why or why not?
DISCUSSION
8. The issue of pirated software is one that the software industry fights on a daily basis. The
major centers of software piracy are in places like Russia and China where salaries and
disposable income are comparatively low. Given that people in developing and
economically depressed countries will fall behind the industrialized world technologically if
they can’t afford access to new generations of software, is it reasonable to blame
someone for using pirated software when it costs two months salary to buy a legal copy of
MS Office? If you answered no, specify at what income level it’s okay to make or buy
illegal copies of software. What approach could software companies use to combat the
problem apart from punitive measure, like pressuring the government to impose sanctions
on transgressors?
DISCUSSION
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INDUSTRY & GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE – Lack of Ethics in the Workplace Can Lead to Lost Productivity (p.
227)
• This is a great discussion piece, as it puts a number on lost productivity because of people
paying attention to March Madness instead of working.
• Your students will be able to easily relate to this, as they often mix work and play (on
INDUSTRY PEPSPECTIVE – Personally Identifiable Information Not Needed (p. 234)
• The old method of identity theft used to focus on getting someone to give up a password.
• Now, identity thieves don’t even need that information.
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE – Cyberattacks Now Considered an Act of War (p. 237)
• Cyberattackes are getting so bad that the U.S. federal government has now determined that
they can be responded to as if they were an act of war.
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE – Mobile Devices: The New Big Corporate Security Headache (p. 247)
• Security for mobile devices is problematic. For personal devices, most people don’t have
good security software.
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ADDITIONAL ASSIGNMENTS AND EXERCISES
TRACE THE ROUTE OF YOUR JOURNEY TO A WEB SITE
Note: Use this in the Privacy section.
• This exercise reinforces the idea of networks and is also useful to demonstrate a command–
driven user interface.
When you send e-mail or visit a Web site on a stored on a computer somewhere, your
request for service goes through lots of computers other than your own. First, it goes from your
computer to the server that’s connecting you to the Internet. It may even move between
computers within your school or service provider.
The tracert function in DOS (which stands for Disk Operating System, is the operating
system that we used before Windows) allows you to see that journey. To get to DOS, you have
to go to the Command Prompt option in Windows.
You’ll get a DOS-like screen window and the first thing you’ll see is a note about the version
of Windows you’re using and a declaration of Microsoft’s copyright. Next comes the C:\
prompt with the name of the folder you’re currently in. It will look something like this (regular
text – not the bold):
C:\>
Or perhaps…
Chapter 08 – Protecting People and Information: Threats and Safeguards
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
Note: Use this in the Ethics section
Let’s analyze the following situation. You have access to the sales and customer information in
a flower shop. You discover that the boyfriend of a woman you know is sending roses to three
other women on a regular basis. The woman you know is on the flower list, but she believes
that she’s the only woman in his romantic life. You really think you should tell the woman. Your
dilemma is that you have a professional responsibility to keep the company’s information
private. However, you also believe that you have a responsibility to the woman. Do you tell
her?
Are there factors that would change your decision? Each team member should individually
consider the additional information below. Indicate whether any one or more of these factors
would change your decision. Then form a consensus with your team.
Note: Some changes you could make to the exercise
Additional Facts
Yes
No
Why?
1
The woman is your sister.
2
The man is your brother.
belief that they will soon be married.
4
The woman is already married.
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