Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Ethics of the Internet movement	Raging	07/22/03
The internet is big in our lives today. Where is it headed in the future & how do ethics apply to the internet movment for businesses, consumers & governments. Interested to hear takes on this matter. All suggestions welcome.
Answered By		Answered On
Jim.McGinness		07/22/03
I'm not persuaded that the Internet presents entirely new problems for businesses, consumers, and governments, but it certainly makes easier some things that used to be hard and the side effects from this are sometimes undesirable. 1. Businesses gather data about their customers. This happens in brick-and-mortar stores as well as online. Some of the uses to which they put that data raise ethical issues. Governments have tried to require sites to post privacy statements, but the privacy statements are largely ignored by the public and there continue to be reports of abuses of the collected data. 2. Vandalism and burglary occurs in physical space. We have several varieties of vandalism-like activities on the Internet: breaking into computers or businesses' databases, posting abusive stuff, mail bombing, etc. Perhaps spam fits in this category. 3. There is an ongoing debate about file sharing over the Internet where the contents of the files are copyrighted material. 4. Between Linux, the various free BSD distributions, the GNU tools, Apache web server, and a wealth of languages like Perl, Tcl, Python, PHP, and Ruby, there is an enormous body of free software available. What the ethical implications of this may be are still being worked out. Are there ethical issues that depend for their validity on scarcity? On scarcity of something that the Internet makes non-scarce?

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