Ethical Issues Related to the Use of Information Technology

Ethical Issues Related to the Use of Information Technology

Introduction

This paper is based on the widespread use of information technology in virtually all the various fields and disciplines in the world. This extensive employment of information technology has caused various ethical and social issues to arise. The purpose of this paper is to highlight those issues, discussing in detail the causes and effects of those issues on the accessing, processing, and retrieving the personal information.

Protecting personal information and other ethical issues in the use of Information technology

Protection and privacy of personal information may be defined as a distinct condition of life classified by the exclusion from exposure. Protection and privacy of personal information is a significant right for the fact that it is an essential condition for several other rights like personal autonomy and freedom. Thus, there is an alliance between human dignity, freedom, and privacy. The respect to the privacy of a person is to accept the fact that, that person has a right to freedom and also to acknowledge that person as a distinct human being. On the basis of this definition, there are two significant aspects that are specifically relevant must be emphasized for the information profession. The first one of these is that privacy being an idea is closely associated to information. The fact that privacy is denoted by means information entails that it is practical to demarcate the various classifications of privacy like information relating to the privacy of an individual's body, private communications, and the information related to the possessions of a person (Walters, 2001).

Despite the fact that technology greatly effects the collection, storage, dissemination, and retrieval of information, its major ethical implications are associated to the manipulation and inaccessibility/accessibility of the personal information. It arises the prospect of simultaneous and a wider access to information. It becomes more convenient, by implication, to access the personal information of a person by an increased number of people. A person, on the contrary, may be secluded from essential information in a digital form, by means of various security initiatives like passwords (Smith, 2002).

The technological management of information stands for the incorporation of information, like fusion of documents; their re-packaging, like translations of the incorporation of graphical and textual formats; and the practicable alteration of information, like alteration of the photographic images by digital methods and processes. Therefore, the employment ...