Ethics, Privacy, and Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

Posted on Mar 15, 2025 in Business Administration and Management (BAM)

Ethics, Privacy, and Intellectual Property

  • Advances in Data Analysis Techniques

    • Profiling

      • Combining data from multiple sources to create detailed dossiers on individuals.

    • Nonobvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)

      • Combining data from multiple sources to find hidden connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists.
  • Mobile Device Growth
    • Tracking of individual cell phones.

Candidate Ethical Principles

  • Golden Rule
    • Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
  • Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative
    • If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone.
  • Descartes’ Rule of Change
    • If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all.

Candidate Ethical Principles (Cont.)

  • Utilitarian Principle
    • Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value.
  • Risk Aversion Principle
    • Take the action that produces the least harm or potential cost.
  • Ethical “No Free Lunch” Rule
    • Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone unless there is a specific declaration otherwise.

Professional Codes of Conduct

  • Promulgated by Associations of Professionals
    • Examples: AMA, ABA, AITP, ACM
  • Promises by professions to regulate themselves in the general interest of society.

Real-World Ethical Dilemmas

  • One Set of Interests Pitted Against Another
    • Example: Right of company to maximize productivity of workers versus workers’ right to use the Internet for short personal tasks.

Information Rights: Privacy and Freedom in the Internet Age

  • Privacy:
    • Claim of individuals to be left alone, free from surveillance or interference from other individuals, organizations, or state; claim to be able to control information about yourself.
  • In the United States, privacy is protected by:
    • First Amendment (freedom of speech)
    • Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure)
    • Additional federal statutes (e.g., Privacy Act of 1974)

Fair Information Practices

  • Set of principles governing the collection and use of information
    • Basis of most U.S. and European privacy laws.
    • Based on mutuality of interest between record holder and individual.
    • Restated and extended by FTC in 1998 to provide guidelines for protecting online privacy.
  • Used to drive changes in privacy legislation
    • COPPA
    • Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
    • HIPAA
    • Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011

FTC FIP Principles

  • Notice/Awareness (Core Principle)
    • Websites must disclose practices before collecting data.
  • Choice/Consent (Core Principle)
    • Consumers must be able to choose how information is used for secondary purposes.
  • Access/Participation
    • Consumers must be able to review and contest the accuracy of personal data.

FTC FIP Principles (Cont.)

  • Security
    • Data collectors must take steps to ensure the accuracy and security of personal data.
  • Enforcement
    • Must be a mechanism to enforce FIP principles.

Internet Challenges to Privacy

  • Cookies
    • Identify browser and track visits to site.
    • Super cookies (Flash cookies)
  • Web Beacons (Web Bugs)
    • Tiny graphics embedded in emails and Web pages.
    • Monitor who is reading email messages or visiting a site.
  • Spyware
    • Surreptitiously installed on a user’s computer.
    • May transmit user’s keystrokes or display unwanted ads.
  • Google services and behavioral targeting

The United States allows businesses to gather transaction information and use this for other marketing purposes.

  • Opt-out vs. opt-in model

Online industry promotes self-regulation over privacy legislation.

However, the extent of responsibility taken varies:

  • Complex/ambiguous privacy statements
  • Opt-out models selected over opt-in
  • Online “seals” of privacy principles

Property Rights: Intellectual Property

  • Intellectual property: intangible property of any kind created by individuals or corporations.
  • Three main ways that intellectual property is protected:
    • Trade secret: intellectual work or product belonging to a business, not in the public domain.
    • Copyright: statutory grant protecting intellectual property from being copied for the life of the author, plus 70 years.
    • Patents: grants creator of invention an exclusive monopoly on ideas behind invention for 20 years.

Challenges to Intellectual Property Rights

  • Digital media is different from physical media (e.g., books)
    • Ease of replication
    • Ease of transmission (networks, Internet)
    • Difficulty in classifying software
    • Compactness
    • Difficulties in establishing uniqueness

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

  • Makes it illegal to circumvent technology-based protections of copyrighted materials.