Please send questions to
st10@humboldt.edu .
CIS 450 - Week 14, Lecture 1 - November 29, 2011
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Ethics and Knowledge Management
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(most of these notes were typed in after the actual lecture...)
* This is a BIG topic -- there are whole books on it!
* 1 example: "Ethical Issues and Social Dilemmas in Knowledge
Management: Organizational Innovation", Goncalo Jorge Morais
da Costa (ISLA Leiria, Portugal)
http://www.igi-global.com/book/ethical-issues-social-dilemmas-knowledge/37348
* BUT -- it is too important to not discuss at least a little!
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ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
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* Handed out an abridged version of the "ACM Code of Ethics and
Professional Conduct";
************
free-write:
come up with 2-3 examples of how one (or more) of the
points on the "ACM Code of Ethics..." might be said
to apply to KMS's;
************
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"Information Ethics"
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* I'm not sure this site is authoritative, but it seems like a
good starting point for some additional discussion of
this area:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/infomgt/ethics.htm
"Information Ethics", by "Veryard Projects";
(so, should keep in mind that this does seem to be a
UK commercial site)
* This site notes:
"There are a number of ethical issues that can arise in information
management.", and breaks these up into four categories (which I
don't feel are exhaustive, BUT are interesting):
* "professional ethics"
* they define as:
"the responsibility of the analyst towards the organization";
^^ I disagree with that limitation pretty vehemently;
I prefer ACM's attitude, that professional ethics
should be BROADER in scope than this (to society as well);
* "data protection and privacy"
* they define as:
"the responsibility of the organization towards the data
subject"
* "business ethics"
* they define as:
"the responsibility of the organization towards society"
* "discrimination and justice"
* they define as:
"the responsibility of society towards the data subject"
* ethics of modeling
* Recall CIS 315's discussion of database models --
a database model is a model of a model --
a representation of the USERS' view of what is
important/significant about the significant entities
in their scenario;
* do we model in KMSs?
* sure -- if nothing else, one or more database models
are implicitly (and hopefully explicitly) involved
with any operational databases within a KMS;
* we also decide what is important and significant in
deciding what tools to include in a KMS, what data to
elicit, what data to keep, etc.;
...and aren't many (most?) UML diagram types creating
what we hope are useful models of various aspects of
a system?
* So -- should consider ethical issues as we build the models
related to a KMS;
* This site's take on this:
* "A model is *not* merely a description of the real world.
It expresses some *intentions* about the real world."
* that doesn't fit badly with our CIS 315 database model
idea, I think; the intentions there are to model what's
important in the context of that sceneario, for the users'
day-to-day operational activities (for an operational
database)
* Going from this idea to the ethical implications:
* "When modelling people, therefore, the model expresses
*intentions* relating to these people, including the
intention to judge people according to particular
criteria."
* "The inclusion of *particular* criteria in an information
model, enabling *particular* decision or selection
processes, therefore has *ethical* and *legal* implications."
* "If people are judged according to inaccurate or
inappropriate data, and if subjective assessments are
mistaken for reliable facts, the *information model* carries
some of the responsibility for this."
* "The analyst cannot hide behind the convenient fiction of
moral neutrality."
* Might redlining be considered an example of this?
* Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
"Redlining is the practice of denying, or increasing the
cost of services such as banking, insurance, access to
jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets
to residents in certain, often racially determined,
areas."
...."Reverse redlining occurs when a lender or insurer
particularly targets minority consumers, not to deny them
loans or insurance, but rather to charge them more than
would be charged to a similarly situated majority
consumer."
* So, for example, if the decision support system that is
part of your KMS makes or suggests decisions on such
grounds -- that might be a problem;
(and you can probably think of other scenarios/examples;)
* privacy and data protection
* data ownership - "Who 'owns' the data?"
* The "Information Ethics" website asks some interesting
questions in this regard, also;
* "Does a company own the data it has collected about a person?"
* "Does the person himself/herself have any ownership rights
over his/her ‘own’ data?"
* You can probably think of ways to take this further, too --
for example, does a person in an organization have any
"right" or ownership to his or her tacit knowledge?
* What about the "information wants to be free" school of
thought?
* But this is really just part of Stewart Brand's original
quote;
* Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
* Stewart Brand - "who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole
Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be
liberating rather than oppressing."
* "The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at
the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve
Wozniak:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because
it's so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your
life."
* [ASIDE -- and, really, hasn't that been one of the main
goals of these KMSs we have been discussing this semester?
...to somehow get people the right information in the
right place, and at the right time as well?]
"On the other hand, information wants to be free, because
the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all
the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other."
* Want a shorter version?
"Brand's conference remarks are transcribed in the Whole
Earth Review (May 1985, p. 49) and a later form appears in
his The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT:
Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be
expensive. ...That tension will not go away."
* following the link from "Who owns your mother's maiden name?"
on the "Information Ethics" website --
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/infomgt/mother.htm
...there are a few more bits of interesting food for thought;
* (each of these also includes links to even MORE discussion/
information on that topic, if you are interested)
* identity -
"Surely your mother's maiden name belongs (ultimately) to your
mother. But perhaps it's not her name any more. (It
identifies a person who no longer exists - your mother when
she was a girl.)"
...there is the need to "identify the thing to which ...
information refers";
* trust -
"Lots of companies use "mother's maiden name" as a kind of
password - which is pretty stupid really, as it's dead easy to
find out. (Even if you try to be clever, and give the bank
your grandmother's or greatgrandmother's maiden name instead,
it's not very secure.)"
* data ownership -
"Every bank that stores my mother's maiden name thinks it
"owns" (and must "protect") this data item - and so it gets
replicated all around the internet."
* status -
"What if your mother still uses her maiden name? What if you
have the same surname that your mother had when she was a
girl? Does this tell us something about you?"
* this topic's "more" link brings up a salient point, I
think;
* for SIMPLICITY, we make simplifying assumptions in our
modeling, in our systems, in our algorithms --
* BUT --
(http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/infomgt/mother.htm#status)
* "However, for many purposes, what matters to the
'average' business is the 'average' customer.
* This representation is also a form of
identity (template) -
* any customer or employee who doesn't fit the template
may be subject to (possibly unfair) discrimination.
[it may not even be intended or deliberate;]
* If a finance company gives you a poor credit rating
because of some coincidence of surname - how will you
find out, and to whom can you complain?"
* privacy -
"Is your mother's maiden name (a) private information or (b)
public knowledge?"
* (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/security/privacy.htm)
* "Privacy means that some data subject has some rights over
some data.
* What can the data subject do with the data? (e.g. publish,
hide, preserve, alter, destroy)
* What can other agents NOT do with the data? (e.g. publish,
hide, preserve, alter, destroy)
* What recompense is the data subject entitled to, in the
event of any accidental or deliberate breach of these
rights."
* "Data protection implies a set of mechanisms to ...
* ...support the rights of the data subject,
* ...limit the actions of other agents, and
* ...resolve any disputes."
* Privacy and granularity - from
(http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/infomgt/ethics.htm#privacygranularity)
* "Three possible ways of capturing personal information, in
database records for each PERSON:
1. A single occurrence of PERSON for each human being.
2. A single occurrence of PERSON for each human being in each
(socio-economic) role.
3. Personal information aggregated into demographic or
behavioural statistics."
* "One of the aims of the UK Data Protection Act (and of similar
legislation in other countries) is to prevent the combination
of data from several sources, for purposes other than that for
which the data were originally collected.
* This means that (2) is preferred to (1).
* For some purposes, we are only allowed access to statistical
aggregations of data, but not the raw data
themselves. This means that (3) is preferred to (1) and
(2)."
* "Then the fun is to predict the behaviour of an individual from
the demographic data, for example:
* what is the probability that this person will respond
positively to this mailshot
* what is the probability that this person will prove a good
credit risk
* Thus it is possible to dis-aggregate and restore data, to
return to the individual person from the anonymous totals
and averages.
* Of course, this process introduces errors and
inaccuracies.
* Does this benefit the person whose privacy is at stake?
Hardly!
* Imagine: you are denied a loan because you live in a
dubious district, or you belong to some demographic
category that the statisticians depreciate. "
[ ^-- that's redlining, isn't it?]
* [ASIDE: isn't there a DANGER that this very sort of
thing could arise from drilling-down in data-mined
patterns from a data warehouses, gathered from various
sources?]