Vol. 4, No. 2: Fall/Winter 2008
Drawing the Line in Cyberspace
by Elizabeth Rosdeitcher
Kalpana Shankar’s informatics ethics course prepares students to make rational, moral decisions in the shifting terrain of computer and information technology.
The identity thief in T.C. Boyle’s edge-of-your-seat thriller Talk Talk sits in the cubicle of a public library trolling through names on a public Web site. “In thrall to the munificent and all-encompassing kingdom of information,” he is pursuing a surprisingly simple scheme that targets the investment accounts of the “rich and super-rich.” The enterprise, he muses to himself, is like “picking up nuggets off the floor of a gold mine. When have you got enough? When do you stop? He could have sat there all day and all night too.”
You could say that the technology he uses simply offers new methods for age-old crimes. Rather than picking medical records out of a dumpster or picking pockets, this thief picks up data from a Web site, adopting the new and improved technique of data-mining. Or is the nature of his transgression something new?
As a scholar and researcher in social informatics, Assistant Professor of Informatics Kalpana Shankar explores the way computer and information technologies shape and transform our social, professional, personal, and civic lives. In her teaching she also looks at their ethical implications. “Some philosophers argue that there’s nothing new, that we can apply traditional ethical thinking to this technology.” But according to Shankar, several features differentiate information technology from others, giving way to “a whole new species of moral problems.”
It is this new species that her course I453/I590 Computer and Information Ethics is designed to address. The problems include identity theft, but extend to more nuanced and less ethically clear issues, among them: privacy and surveillance, the availability and use of biomedical information, cyberactivism, copyright and intellectual property, values and design, the ethics of social spaces like MySpace and Facebook, the digital divide and disability.
Boyle’s identity thief himself notes some of the qualities that set the world of information technology apart: it is an enormous “kingdom” holding limitless volumes of information to which he has easy access.
Shankar notes a few of the unique qualities of information technology. “First, there is the sheer scope of what computers and information technology can do. Our toasters are limited in functionality; our computers aren’t. They facilitate everything we do, from taking care of our health and record-keeping to our shopping.”
Next is the scale: “It’s not just something that affects a few people,” she continues. “If you post something on a bulletin board, many, many people can see it. That creates a certain persistence which other technologies don’t have. If we make a statement, or a statement is made about us, which is false or defamatory, it stays there.”
Then there’s an invisible component: “Much of the information that is collected about us we don’t have a chance to see, we don’t own, we can’t correct, we can’t verify. That’s different from most technologies we interact with. They don’t leave that kind of trail.”
There’s also “the instantaneous nature of the communication. We post something and it’s out there immediately for many, many people to see. If you put all those things together—the scope, the scale, the immediacy, the invisibility—we do have a new problem.”
How do you get ethically grounded in cyberspace?
Walk into Shankar’s classroom in the School of Informatics, and you will find the students re- arranging the first few rows of long, narrow desks into a circle. That shift in the focus of the classroom is reflected in Shankar’s pedagogy, as well as her grading policy, which weighs class participation heavily, as 40 percent of a student’s grade.
Shankar explains that student input in the course extends to the creation of the syllabus itself. “Before the 2006 election, for example, I had a student who was interested in cyberactivism and I made that part of the course. This year several students wanted to include a section on disability and the digital divide.”
“I’m not here to tell them what to think,” she explains, “nor do I want them to think whatever I think is right or even that there’s going to be a right way. At the same time, I don’t want them to enter a relativistic world in which whatever you think is right is right. I want them to walk out of the course this semester with a framework that enables them to think systematically about the problems we’re all going to face. What motivates the core of the course,” says Shankar, “is how you and I can make rational, moral decisions about using this technology.”
The first part of the course establishes a framework. She introduces the students to key concepts in moral philosophy: Aristotle’s notion of virtue, John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, and Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Students learn to ask questions such as “Who are the stakeholders for a particular situation? What are the impacts on them? What kind of consequences can I anticipate, knowing full well that there are consequences we cannot anticipate? And certainly we have cautionary tales like that of the atomic bomb to teach us that we don’t know the consequences.”
Many of the discussions revolve around questions about the value of privacy.
“Some say privacy doesn’t exist anymore. Should we care?” asks Michelle Scott, a student in the class pursuing a graduate degree in the School of Library and Information Science.
It turns out that Scott does care, passionately, as do several other students in the class. In fact, the class itself led her to realize just how much this and other issues matter.
Another issue that affects Scott personally is the question of accessibility. Scott could turn up the volume on her computer as high as it goes and she still would not comprehend the audible features of a YouTube video. That is because due to a hearing impairment she mostly relies on lip-reading to understand what other people are saying. And more and more, she points out, video is becoming an integral part of the Web.
But with respect to privacy, she explains, “It’s one of those things you know is important, but you don’t know how important it is till you stop to think about.”
Scott mentions the recent Google–Double Click merger. Google has access to records for online searches carried out through its search engine, and if you have a Gmail account, everything on it is their property. Double Click sells online ads to businesses and keeps track of which ad links we follow. “Between the two companies” observes Scott, “they have a huge amount of information.”
Or consider that “marketers can buy databases with more information than you can imagine. Your data is sold to so many different companies and you can’t say, ‘I don’t want anyone to know this.’ You don’t have the right. It is public.”
Or what if an insurance company discovers through DNA screening that you have a gene for breast cancer? Or if it wants to find out if you buy a lot of alcohol, cigarettes, or fatty foods at the grocery store, the electronic cards issued by grocery stores for our use track our purchases. Could insurance companies raise your rates based on this new information?
“I don’t want to seem paranoid,” Scott adds. “Privacy has always been an issue. But now you have broadband and storing has become basically free. The scale of it is huge, which makes it a bigger issue.”
And while she is not speaking about identity theft per se, Scott implies that as businesses, the government, and others increase their stock of information about citizens, something of value is being stolen, and can be used to our disadvantage.
Aaron Houssian, another student in the class, likewise remarks on the sense of something valuable being stolen: “When I get an uninvited e-mail from a business, it steals my time.”
“Left unchecked,” believes Houssian, an informatics graduate student in the field of human-computer interaction/design who studies and designs computer games, “businesses would build more and more robust profiles about you. What could they do with that? I don’t really want to find that out and maybe we’re being pessimistic. The upside,” he adds with obvious reservations, “is they can sell you things you want.”
Scott and Houssian both mention the difference between the way the United States and the European Union treat personal data. In the U.S. you don’t own your own data, they explain; in the EU you do. In the United Kingdom the government protects people and will not allow businesses to solicit certain types of information over the Internet. Both Scott and Houssian would like to see U.S. policies do more to protect the privacy of our information.
For Felix Terkhorn, another student in the class, the course is his “last stop” before “heading out into the wild cutthroat world. I want to be equipped to function in that world,” he explains.
Terkhorn, a master’s student in computer science, was recently approached by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for a job in his field of data and search. While he is not in principle opposed to working for the department, he says, “I had to ask myself, ‘Was I going to write programs that would lead to eavesdropping on innocent Americans?’” Or, he speculates, “If I’m dealing with people’s medical records, what do I have to do to keep them secure? What is acceptable use?” Moreover, in a field made up, Terkhorn observes, “of a ragtag group from teenagers to Bill Gates,” a professional identity is often hard to pin down. But the ethical grounding this course offers helps to consolidate one.
Shankar observes that “It’s sometimes hard not to let this course veer into a current events course. It can become very topical because of the way this technology evolves. Two or three years ago things like Facebook were not really of interest.” The challenge, she explains, “is to use these new technologies or applications as illustrative of deeper issues. Rather than focusing on the next big thing, I like to ask, ‘How can I use what we’re doing every day to illustrate the broader concerns we ought to have about the role of information technology in our lives?’ To me this is a much more fruitful and interesting way of exploring the topic. Because these technologies get embedded in the way we work, the way we play, the way we communicate,” Shankar explains, “they have consequences we may not have expected for our social lives, our work lives, everything.”
To bring this point home to her students, Shankar asked them one semester to give up one form of information technology for 24 hours.
“It wasn’t just the sense of addiction to e-mail or cell phones, that you had to remind yourself not to use them. It was the social consequences of not using them. One student woke up and realized that because he couldn’t contact his teammate by e-mail, he had to wake her up with a phone call at an early hour. Another student gave up his cell phone and was then in the difficult position of having to make plans ahead of time.
“This was a powerful way to illustrate why we need to think about this. So maybe I take the term ethics and stretch it like Silly Putty, but I think that’s OK.”
Yet as the “kingdom of information” expands exponentially, it too stretches like Silly Putty, extending its reach further and further into our lives. “We now store information in exabytes,” explains Felix Terkhorn, “which is one quintillion or a billion times a billion bytes.” And as the technology advances and grows, its ethical implications seem to grow along with it.
Elizabeth Rosdeitcher is a freelance writer in Bloomington.
