The Intersection Of Information Laws - 2294 Words

Some of the issues that I would like to explore in this paper, are the intersection of information laws, and how they intersect with the ethical standards, and the actual practice. Since computers and technologies grow extremely fast, the laws are unable to govern new developments in the field. Therefor those that develop these systems and programs have an ethical imperative to, analysis the impact that these systems could have on others. When new technologies and standards are created, one must look at the effect of the technology, and the possible ways that someone could maliciously obtain, or misuse data. Currently in the united states the privacy laws that exist only protect very specific forms of data, and only controls a small†¦show more content†¦The only area in which the government gets involved in privacy collection is to enforce fair trade agreements, and practices that directly violate the terms of use agreement that exists between an end users and a company or g roup (Solove and Hartzog 585). In the European Union, the standards for privacy is vaguely worded, and only protects from the transmission of data to countries outside the EU (Sipior et al. 6) The major issue with this practice is many forms of gathering data, can legally be done so long as the end user has been informed of this practice, and has agreed to it (Warner 18). Most users however are not going to spend the time to actually read what they are agreeing to, and therefor will likely agree to something that they would actually object to (Warner 14). Obviously, in an ideal world, people would read everything that they are agreeing to, but the fact of the matter is that people will not. Knowing this, there is an obvious legal loophole that anyone wishing to do mine and profit from data gathered can easily exploit. Since the laws are not currently able to protect people from these practices, the ethical responsibility lies directly on the companies and programmers that write the software. These kinds of agreements that are imposed on end users in the form of end user