Professional Ethics and
Responsibilities
Ethical Guidelines for Computer
Professionals
Guidelines and Professional Responsibilities:
• Understand what success means
• Include users (such as medical staff, technicians, pilots,
office workers) in the design and testing stages to provide
safe and useful systems
• Do a thorough, careful job when planning and scheduling a
project and when writing bids or contracts
• Don’t assume existing software is safe or correct; review
and test it
• Be open and honest about capabilities, safety, and
limitations of software
• Pay attention to defaults
Scenarios
Methodology:
• Brainstorming phase:
– List all the people and organizations affected (the
stakeholders)
– List risks, issues, problems, and consequences
– List benefits. Identify who gets each benefit
– In cases where there is no simple yes or no
decision, but rather one has to choose some
action, list possible actions
Scenarios (cont.)
Methodology:
• Analysis phase
– Identify responsibilities of the decision maker
– Identify rights of stakeholders
– Consider the impact of the options on the
stakeholders (consequences, risks, benefits,
harms, costs)
– Categorize each potential action as ethically
obligatory, prohibited, or acceptable
– When there are multiple options, select one,
considering the ethical merits of each
Scenarios
Your Customer is a community clinic. The clinic works with
families that have problems of family violence. It has three
sites in the same city, including a shelter for battered women
and children. The director wants a computerized record
system, networked for the three sites, with the ability to
transfer files among sites and make appointments at any
site for any other. She wants to have an Internet connection
for routine Web access and e-mail communication with other
social service agencies about client needs. She wants a few
laptop computers on which staff can carry records when they
visit clients at home. At the shelter, staff can use only first
names for clients, but the records contains last names and
forwarding addresses of women who have recently left.
The clinic's budget is small and she wants to keep the cost as
low as possible.
Scenarios
Your company is developing a free e-mail
service that will include targeted
advertising based on the content of the
e-mail messages. You are part of the
team designing the system. What are
your ethical responsibilities?
Scenarios
You are a relatively junior programmer
working on modules that collect data
from loan application forms and convert
them to formats required by the parts of
the program that evaluate the
applications. You find that some
demographic data are missing from
some forms, particularly race and age.
What should your program do? What
should you do?
• Your team is working on a computer-controlled device
for treating cancerous tumors. The computer controls
direction, intensity, and timing of a beam that destroys
the tumor. Various delays have put the project behind
schedule, and the deadline is approaching. There will
not be time to complete all the planned testing. The
system has been functioning properly in the routine
treatment scenarios tested so far. You are the project
manager, and you are considering whether to deliver
the system on time, while continuing testing, and to
make patches if the team finds bugs.
Scenarios
Suppose you are a member of a team working
on a computer-controlled crash avoidance
system for automobiles. You think the system
has a flaw that could endanger people. The
project manager does not seem concerned
and expects to announce completion of the
project soon. Do you have an ethical
obligation to do something?
Scenarios
Your company has 25 licenses for a
computer program, but you discover
that it has been copied onto 80
computers.
Scenarios
You have a small consulting business. The CyberStuff
company plans to buy software to run a new
collaborative content-sharing Web site. CyberStuff
wants to hire you to evaluate bids from vendors. Your
spouse works for NetWorkx and did most of the work
in writing the bid that NetWorkx plans to submit. You
read the bid while your spouse was working on it and
you think it is excellent. Do you tell CyberStuff about
your spouse’s connection with NetWorkx?
Scenarios
A team of programmers is developing a
communications system for firefighters to use
when fighting a fire. Firefighters will be able to
communicate with each other, with
supervisors near the scene, and with other
emergency personnel. The programmers will
test the system in a field near the company
office.
Scenarios
You are the computer system administrator for
a mid-sized company. You can monitor the
company network from home, and you
frequently work from home. Your niece, a
college student, is visiting for a week. She
asks to use your computer to check her e-
mail. Sure, you say. You are being a gracious
host. What is the ethical problem?
