ETHICAL ISSUES IN REGARD TO CYBER SPYING

ETHICAL ISSUES IN REGARD TO CYBER SPYING

Introduction

Computer technology has fueled various transitions being witnessed on the world today. Currently, practices such as e-commerce, e-learning and e-government have become common. For instance, it is almost impossible to think of life without email. With the world evolution trend, changes must be embraced and the associated dangers understood if technology is expected to have positive impacts on the society. For example, young children currently own computers and have unlimited access to the Internet both in school, some even have more knowledge of computers than the parents. Following that fact, Illegal drugs in schools, cyberbullying, and pornography have turned to be the order of the day. Internet has also created favorable conditions for refined cheating methods, intellectual and criminal hacking. To curb some of these issues, cyber spying has been proposed as a solution [3]. However, this solution has been accompanied by other major concerns in regard to ethics. For instance, monitoring employees secretly will enable the management to know the reluctant employees and push them so that they can deliver. On the other hand, this means compromising their privacy rights because it’s done without their consent.

Cyber spying is the practice of accessing secrets and other information inside another person’s computer without his or her permission and knowledge through methods such as Internet, proxy servers or networks [1]. This can be achieved by the use of cracking techniques and other malicious softwares like spyware and Trojan horses.

Brey’s Three-Step Strategy

Identification

Everybody needs his or her private life to remain private, and that is the reason behind many people having passwords on their computers and other devices. For that matter, nobody would be happy to learn that someone else has been secretly intruding into his or her private life. Comparing that fact with what cyber spying entails, it comes out clearly as unethical because it is interfering with the privacy rights of the victim without his or her consent [2]. Some of the information people tend to maintain private has proved to be worthy private because it may be tempting when accessed by a second party. Among such kind of information are the bank details which may highly tempt a second party into stealing.

Analyzing

Cyber spying mainly entails intrusion into personal computers without their consent and that highly exposes them under privacy violation because they are not aware whether they are being monitored [4]. Cyber spying is sometimes importance to the concerned party, but under these circumstances; the targeted party should be notified first, a step which is rarely taken by most of the organizations when monitoring the employees.

Deliberation

James Moor’s ethical framework for just consequentialism advocated for a deliberation over all policies concerning an ethical issue from an impartial point of view to help in determining their validity as ethical policies [3]. In pursuit to this theory, cyber spying approach of monitoring employee’s policy is unethical because it interferes with the employees privacy rights. So, cyber spying policy should not be legalized considering its harms on employee side.

Justification

Logically, everybody has his own private life which he or she would not be happy if accessed by any other person. Such information may not necessarily be kept in mind because some might have been shared from a different party through emails and other message platforms. Such kind of information includes but not limited to relationship concerns, loan details and health status [5]. Cyber spying on the other hand enhances exposure of such kind of information into the public domain and results into more harm on the victims. This builds up the foundation for my stand that cyber spying should be illegalized in all aspects.

Work cited

1. Artt, Sarah. “‘An otherness that cannot be sublimated’ Shades of Frankenstein in Penny Dreadful and Black Mirror.” Science Fiction Film & Television2 (2018): 257-  275.
2. Cooney, Martin, et al. “Pitfalls of Affective Computing: How can the automatic visual communication of emotions lead to harm, and what can be done to mitigate such         risks?.” The Web Conference 2018 (WWW’18), Lyon, France, April 23-27, 2018.            ACM Publications, 2018.
3. Cole, Eric, et al. Cyber Spying Tracking Your Family’s (Sometimes) Secret Online Lives. Elsevier, 2005.
4. Schiller, Jon. Cyber attacks & protection: civilization depends on Internet & email. CreateSpace, 2010.
5. Uma, M., and Ganapathi Padmavathi. “A Survey on Various Cyber Attacks and their ” IJ Network Security15.5 (2013): 390-396.