Respect and ethics
25 Apr 2020
Introduction
As the development of technology, software engineering plays a more and more important role in all human’s daily life. It is unavoidable that there are many different ethical issues conflicting with advanced technology. For example, an application may hurt some group of people’s interests or it conveys an offensive idea. I think the ethic in the software engineering context is to respect others while programming. It is very important to respect others like others’ privacy, their religion, their interests, and so on. As long as we do it with respect to everyone, we can solve a lot of ethical issues in software engineering. In my opinion, software engineering is meant to make people’s life more convenient which means it should work for people but if it infringes on some people’s rights, it lost the meaning of existing.
Privacy issues
Privacy is always a big issue in modern society. The convenience of the network also exposes common people’s privacy to the public easily. There are many examples that users of a certain application complained about their information is divulged. It is true that the main reason is some lawbreakers use the bugs they found to hack the product and steal the private information of users and sell them to rake in money. This is an example of an ethical issue that using their software engineering skill to commit a crime. There is another ethical issue on privacy is that some companies did not take their responsibility to protect user’s information and some of them may directly sell users’ information. All these behavior break the general ethical principles to respect privacy. Users trust the application that is why they willing to use this product and upload their personal information. Therefore, “computing professionals should only use personal information for legitimate ends”. If they break this rule, it means they not only be unworthy of users’ trust but also fail the computing professional integrity.
Influence of profuct
The other case of the ethical issue on privacy is that the developer accidentally collected users’ private information and post it to the public. Google StreetView is a great example of it. They were meant to take photos of street view but these photographs also contain some private moments of some people. This controversial problem is because those developers did not consider all the effects of their products. They may only look at the positive side that this can help people using maps easily. However, the negative side of this product should be also considered clearly before working on the project. If they analyze StreetView deeply, they will see this product infringes on people’s privacy. Therefore, it is very important to analyze the influence of the product to see if creating an ethical issue.
Some computing professionals may also face a situation that implementing the protection of privacy increases the difficulty of programming. This should not be an excuse for not protecting users’ information. As I mentioned before, creating a user-oriented application must consider the users’ feelings. If it fails on privacy protection, it fails on users’ expectations as well. Then this application is an unsuccessful product and totally lost the original intention of creating this application.
Conclusion
The privacy issue is just one of the ethical issues in software engineering. However, all the ethical issues are showing respect to others. In my opinion, all the programmers should watch out three things. First, keep thinking during the whole developing about whether this product will be disrespectful to anyone. Second, remember the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Third, be open to accepting the suggestion from the users so programmers can address issues of their product in time. In conclusion, being respectful of everything is the key to avoid most of the ethical issues.