Ethical and Moral Issues on Violating Individuals Privacy in Cyber Spaces
Ethical and Moral Issues
Ethics and morals are the standards that enable human beings to choose good from bad (Wang, 2021). For example, executing actions that could harm an individual in any way would be considered bad or wrong ethically and morally. Therefore, if a computer program violates the privacy of an individual, then it is against ethics and morals. According to Tavani (2016), today, everyone who uses computer systems is exposed to violations of privacy. This is because the use of computer systems for shopping and other online transactions requires that a person provide personal details such as name, address, and credit card details. If hackers access this information, it would lead to cybercrime activities.
A computer program that collects information on transactions made when individuals make purchases would infringe on an individual’s right to privacy (Tavani, 2016). Such a program might be successful in capturing a few money laundering criminals but would be unethical to the larger population of purchasers. It would be unethical to collect data on all the purchases made by an individual, including time, product, amount, address, and name, without the individual’s consent. It is even worse when an individual is innocent of the money laundering activities being monitored. Therefore, all factors must be considered before developing the computer program.
Further, the transaction information collected by a computer program could be misused by cybercriminals (Wang, 2021). Such information is collected without an individual’s knowledge, which makes it unethical. Other than being unethical, the information collected becomes a target for cybercrimes, hence, exposing individuals to cyberattacks. In a way, this becomes a catalyst for cybercrime because if such data were not collected or stored in a specific database, it would not be easily accessible to hackers. Also, employees handling the computer program to assess money laundering crime might use the information for unauthorized purposes. For example, the employees could sell transaction data to competitor companies for certain products. This would be unethical and would require the company conducting the transaction assessments to be responsible for maintaining data privacy (Tavani, 2016). For example, employees would be trained and sensitized on the penalties of a data breach.
Is Catching Money Laundering Individuals Beneficial to Society?
A program that evaluates transactions to capture money laundering individuals serves to eliminate money laundering crime but violates an individual’s privacy. If the data obtained from the transactions is only used for the stated purpose and privacy is not further violated, then the process would be considered beneficial to society. When an action is beneficial to society, it is considered morally good (Tavani, 2016). However, according to the case study, the computer program to be developed might still not be competent in capturing money laundering criminals. This makes it debatable whether it would be worth violating customer privacy and still not achieving the intended goal. Therefore, the concept of moral dilemma is introduced in such a situation (Tavani, 2016). However, if the program to be developed would be competent at capturing the money laundering criminals, it would be considered based on the harm that money launderers cause in society versus the harm caused by violating customers’ privacy. The government is expected to protect its people; therefore, even as the Department of Homeland Security, in the case study, decides to develop the computer program, it has to uphold individuals’ data privacy. If it fails to protect data privacy, it would be acting unethically.
References
Tavani, H. T. (2016). Ethics and technology: Controversies, questions, and strategies for ethical computing (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
Wang, R. (2021). Importance of Computer Ethics and Morality in Society. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 631, 42-47. https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125968620.pdf.
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Question 
Case Study 1 (22%):
The Department of Homeland Security is interested in using computers to identify suspected of money laundering operations within the United States. It would like to mine databases containing information about purchases and travel to detect patterns that may identify individuals who are engaged in, or at least planning,
Ethical and Moral Issues on Violating Individuals Privacy in Cyber Spaces
money laundering activity. It asks a panel of information security professionals to determine the feasibility of this project. A panel members say the most difficult problem will be determining what patterns of transactions to look for. As a panel member, you suggest that it might be possible to construct a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to mimic money laundering activity. The program would determine the transactions needed to execute the money laundering act. Once these transactions are determined, it will be possible to search database resources to find evidence of these transactions. However, the major drawback is that there would be no way to narrow the scope of the investigation to a few potential money laundering individuals, and in fact, a large population of individuals would need to be searched, potentially violating many individuals’ privacy.
As an information security professional assigned to this project, what would be the ethical and moral issues, from your perspective, of developing a computer program capable of violating a large population of individuals’ privacy in order to identify and potentially catch a few suspected individuals of money laundering? How does this play into what we learned in this course about the issues related to violating an individual’s privacy? What about the greater good of society by catching these money laundering individuals?
Your paper should be about two pages long (not including the title page and the reference page). References must be listed and cited in APA format. The final paper may be subjected to checking against plagiarism (turnitin.com) by the Instructor. The final paper must follow acceptable originality criteria (no more than 15% originality score).
Save the file using the following file naming convention: ITMG481_Case_Study_First_Last.doc(x) (where first and last are your first and last names resp.) and submit the file in this assignment area. Turnitin.com has been enabled for this assignment, so remember that the submission file type must be either doc or docx.