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Ethical Issues Facing It Pros

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Ethical Issues Facing IT Professionals
Kimon Wherley
CIS207
February 8, 2016
Charles Jacks

Ethical Issues Facing IT Professionals There are many unique challenges we face in this day, and age of information. Information is the means through which the mind expands and increases its capacity to achieve its goals, often as the result of an input from another mind. Thus, information forms the intellectual capital from which human beings construct their lives and secure dignity. However, the building of intellectual capital is vulnerable in many ways. For example, people's intellectual capital is impaired whenever they lose their personal information without being compensated for it, when they are precluded access to information, which is of value to them, when they have revealed information they hold intimate, or when they find out that the information upon which their living depends is in error. The social contract among people in the information age must deal with these threats to human dignity. The ethical issues involved are many and varied. (Richard O. Mason March, 1986) Some of the ethical issues facing IT professionals are Privacy, Accuracy, Property, and Access. Privacy
What information should one be required to divulge about one's self to others? Under what conditions? What information should one be able to keep strictly to one's self? These are among the questions that a concern for privacy raises. Today more than ever cautious citizens must be asking these questions.
Two forces threaten our privacy. One is the growth of information technology, with its enhanced capacity for surveillance, communication, computation, storage, and retrieval. A second, and more insidious threat, is the increased value of information in decision-making. Information is increasingly valuable to policy makers; they covet it even if acquiring it invades another's privacy.

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