Ethics
29 Nov 2017
My definition of Ethics
Ethics is the moral principles that govern ones behavior and actions. These principles are defined by how a person wants to live. In general, a person creates or follows his/her own moral principles but on the basis that they are created to be morally defined right by the public. A person’s moral principle can change depending on what a person can view as right and wrong but ethics is moral principles defined by the public and that a majority must agree with those same principles. For example a person own moral beliefs might compel him/her to do another person harm but the majority public says otherwise would be a vilation of ethical standards. Of course the ethics of a community can change but only if the majority agrees with that change. Some ethical principles that should be common to all in my opinion is do not do harm to others, be respectful to others, and be responsible for one’s actions. In software engineering this can applied by being responsible about user’s and employers private data, test all software thoroughly, be respectful to everybody you are working with and provide helpful insight on software, and if a bug is found on your software own up to it and face your mistakes and fix it.
Case Study: Privacy
One case study that I want to focus on is Privacy and how it affects ethics. In software engineering, that software that build usually uses confidential data that is given to us by the users, such as oasswords, emails, social security numbers, etc. It is the duty of the software engineers to keep these data from being used in a malicious way by keeping it private and secure. It is also the engineers duty to keep the user informed of breaches and how the data that they are giving to us are being used. So when Google created StreetView and did not warn the public of what there software could potentially do, they have already violated ethics of not doing harm to others. People online could use the software app to potentially spy on people, leaving them vulnerable to criminal activities such as theft. Another violation also occured with Google when it was found that the van that was being used to capture images for StreetView was collecting sensitive private data such as Wifi SSID’s and medical and financial records. They had not informed the public and that they shifted the blame to a single engineer where in fact this engineer had informed his superiors of the wifi collection. Not only was Google harming the public but also trying to avoid there responsibility. This violates the ethics of software engineers, even though a single engineer was at fault, it is also the responsibility of the company to keep things in check and to inform the public of complications.
Overall
Overall the ethics of a software engineer is not as simple as lines of code that need to be followed, we are human beings and we make mistakes. It is up to us to rectify these mistakes and to learn from them and to adapt our habits. One’s ethics is how we want to live, a life well lived.