Figure 12.2 Nonobvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)
NORA technology can take information about people from disparate sources and find obscure, nonobvious relationships. It might discover for example, than an applicant for a job at a casino shares a telephone number with a known criminal and issues an alert to the hiring manager.
Finally, advances in networking, including the Internet, promise to greatly reduce the costs of moving and accessing large quantities of data and open the possibility of mining large pools of data remotely using small desktop machines, permitting an invasion of privacy on a scale and with a precision heretofore unimaginable.
12.2 Ethics in an Information Society
Ethics is a concern of humans who have freedom of choice. Ethics is about individual choice: When faced with alternative courses of action, what is the correct moral choice? What are the main features of ethical choice?
BASIC CONCEPTS: RESPONSIBILITY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND LIABILITY
Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals who are responsible for the consequences of their action. Responsibility is a key element of ethical action. Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligation for the decisions you make. Accountability is a feature of systems and social institutions: It means that mechanisms are in place to determine who took responsible action, and who is responsible. Systems and institutions in which it is impossible to find out who took what action are inherently incapable of ethical analysis or ethical action. Liability extends the concept of responsibility further to the area of laws. Liability is a feature of political systems in which a body of laws in place that permits individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors, system, or organizations. Due process is a related feature of law-governed societies and is an process in which laws are known and understood, and there is an ability to appeal to higher authorities to ensure that the laws are applied correctly.