Ethics is a very gray area. Originally I thought ethics would be a lot more black and white. Something like, you don’t do something if it is wrong. Simple and easy, right? However, it is not. In terms of software engineering ethics is just as complex. Some examples of the difficulty is a conflict of ideals and principle. Software engineers have a responsibility on what they make and technology is all over the place, stuff from cars, phones, apps, websites, a lot of things. Because technology is used by everyone, software engineers have to make sure what they make is safe for people. If they slack on what their code, in an extreme example like for a car, the car could possibly malfunction and explode while being driven. And besides the amount of effort being put into code, there is other issues like orders from your boss. Your boss, could tell you to create something you feel against, something that although good in theory be used for potential evil, or perhaps something that invades people’s privacy, or to give intentionally give people wrong information.
To further talk about ethics, I chose a case study about privacy. You can click here to read as well: Click Here
Anyway, this reading was about the importance of intellectual property and people’s personal information and how these sort of data can run into to ethcial issues. In 2007, Google had this streetView feature where it would use these vans and take photographs of neighboorhoods and people in the neighboorhoods. Although this article does not say what Google was using the pictures for, it was later used for more evil deeds. Such as how thieves would use these pictures to find targets to loot. Not only that, but the public themselves were concerned by this, and even voiced their concern, but Google kept going. It wasn’t until Google got bad publicity and was sued that they decided to do something about it. They ended up putting the blame on this one engineer who worked on this project, even though that engineer tried to originally talk to his superiors about his own concern about the collected data.
The actions that google did during this time was not very ethical. They not only lied about collecting data, but also placed the blame on a person that worked on the project, although that person themselves voiced their concern. Google also tuned out the voice of concern from the people being recorded and by the public itself. The project google streetview, could possibly hurt the image of people, because it did not discriminate on what pictures it took. It even took pictures of naked kids playing in the back yard, which is possibly chid pornography. Because these images can be viewed, people could make memes out of people, and burglurs were able to use the data to spy on potential victims.
On top of that Google broke some of the ACM rules of ethics. A standard set of ethical rules for computer science related fields. Such rules were avoiding harm to others, be honest and trustworthy, and respect the privacy of others.