Currently, I’m enrolled in a Security and Trust course. We learn about real world examples (not only computer) of security, trust, ethics, and privacy. The definition of ethics is - “moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity”. Having morals as I’m in the security track of the ICS field is a huge deal. You need to have great ethics and be trustworthy to get a job. Recently in my Security and Trust class, I did a presentation which included a little bit of the topic of privacy. My example explanation of privacy was that people at my work place (an accounting firm) must keep the clients’ trusts by keeping their information private. Whether it’s the client’s social security number, family member’s names or social security numbers, their income, or even debts, all information given to the partners (CPA’s) by the client must be kept confidential. The clients trust the firm that their information will be safe, therefore they have their privacy kept. If one of the partners were to break this trust, therefore having failed their code of ethics, they will likely get fired.
Ethics in software engineering or in any scenario is basically the same. In this case study about privacy, it talks about Google’s StreeView feature. Google was eventually found to have broken many privacy laws and was fined for over $7 million. This was because there were many images on StreetView with naked children playing, people coming out of adult stores, etc., which people did not want on the internet for everyone to see. They also collected personal data through people’s Wi-Fi by the software the Google vehicles used to take images. The compromised data includes (but is not limited to) very sensitive information such as: medical and financial information, passwords, and email content. This obviously breaches those people’s privacy and could happen to anyone. The Google engineers violated both ACM and Software Engineering Code of Ethics by harming people’s images and not respecting their privacy. They should’ve realized that people would notice these images of themselves on StreetView and made sure that the StreetView met the public interest.
The ethical thing to do here would be to filter through the images that the StreetView has, but it would’ve been much simpler to filter through them as they collected new images. However, since they didn’t, there’s so many images for them to look through, rather than doing it in small portions as they collected images. If there’s an image that violates someone’s privacy, then they should remove that and re-take that location image. As for the stolen data; they should clearly delete all traces and storage of that information, as it is sensitive to each person they got it from.