Consider the scenario in which a group of your fellow students approach you to see whether you are interested in participating in a project that is intended to be a commercial venture. The group has become up with a novel approach to obtaining large numbers of e-mail addresses. This requires the development of some software, and once this is used it will be possible to develop a very extensive e-mail address list. Subsequently, this information is to be sold to companies involved in spam advertising. Your voice some initial reservations based upon your concern that this may not be entirely legal/ethical. However, you are assured that the software will only be used to obtain e-mail addresses for people who are normally based overseas- specifically in third world countries. Since the team is to be based in the UK and the software is going to be used to locate e-mail addresses that are normally based outside the UK, you are assured that you will be breaking no UK law.
Asking for further information is necessary to justify what is the commercial enterprise is all about. In addition, consulting a higher personnel is also necessary to gather more significant information. Proper analysis on the data gathered should be done to insure that there is no misuse of privacy rights.
On the first place, spam is threat to privacy rights which makes it not ethical undertaking. Even though the act spamming is to only gather people's email addresses outside from the UK, still it's un-ethical to break the law.
Would you still be willing to participate if the level of remuneration is sufficient?
Probably, it is better to inform others that, as a group, we are not in favor on participating the commercial venture. One good reason is that it violates the privacy since it involves spam advertising, which is not even good even if the remuneration level is sufficient.
At what point would personal remuneration override any ethical reservations that you may have?
When remuneration overrides the ethical issues, that is the time that we could consider it as a benefit of the total compensation to what we will receive as an exchange of performing the service. But beforehand, it is better to consider that the work is for the good of everybody, that everybody should benefit.
Does this compromise your legal position?Yes by involving on certain scenarios like creating a software that violates the privacy of the users through obtaining email addresses in a form of spam advertisements. Upon being involved on this kind of situations, as developers, we are threatened because we can be considered as criminals. Hence it is un-ethical.
No comments:
Post a Comment