Practical Computer Ethics

Those who have peeped into someone else's database or copied software from a friend's disk know that they've been naughty. They gamble that they're unlikely to be caught. Some people have even cut and pasted other's work and used it as their own. They too thought they wouldn't be noticed. But things are changing. They're starting to be noticed - and prosecuted. The world of electronic data, especially since the Internet explosion, is rife with problems of control, censorship, and intellectual property rights. 

Langford's slim introduction is an attempt to map out the ethical problems of computer use and present strategies for dealing with them. He starts out by defining the nature of moral philosophy in terms most readers will understand. In fact he goes on about this rather too long. It's chapter 5 before we get to computers - though his illustrative examples all come from the world of everyday keyboard and network use. 

But in fact many of the problems he identifies are ethical problems which arise from business and management practices rather than from IT itself. Should software developers construct programmes for rogue managers for instance? Would you report your colleagues if they downloaded politically incorrect material in work's time? These are not intrinsically questions of technology [even if they do occur in daily life] and since ethical judgements often rest on making fine distinctions, Langford ought really to be alert to such differences. 

He is more interesting when he plunges into topics such as the Data Protection Act and its vagaries. Anyone who has been involved in creating and publishing materials electronically knows that this area is a minefield, with unexploded devices waiting for those who use material without permissions. 

He deals with the problems of systems administrators and bulletin board moderators [Is it ethical to read other people's mail?], pirated software [more subtle distinctions between outright theft and 'sharing' might have been welcome here] outright hacking, and even forged electronic mail - on which it would have been interesting to hear more. When it comes to the electronic discussion in Newsgroups, his analysis of the possible dilemmas makes posting to them seem like a dangerous sport. It's true that once you post electronically you lose all possible control over what you've written, but his cautions seem to err on the side of paranoia. 

Following the recent trend to excessive summarization, the book ends with a chapter reminding you of what you've just read. There's a skimpy bibliography, and then an interesting Appendix giving an account of the legal tangles surrounding a bulletin board FAQ which listed details of a Canadian murder trial. This was deemed illegal at the time of a press ban on the case - and even though the BB subscribers used aliases, one of them went to jail, so be warned. More consideration of such concrete cases would have been useful. 

Overall, this seems rather a lightweight introduction to a subject crawling with deep complexities, but since I was recently asked by a student for just such a publication, it may be one whose time has come.