Ethics presentations

During lecture on April 6, we will discuss ethics in engineering. As part of that lecture, each team will present to the class an ethical issue relating to computer technology.

Each presentation should:

• describe the technology
• describe an ethical issue or societal implication related to that technology
• describe the categories of people affected by that issue
• describe a range of policies or positions one could take on that issue
• recommend a particular policy or position, and give support for that recommendation

Your team will have 3 minutes to make its presentation, plus another 3 minutes for class discussion. Because this is such a small amount of time, we recommend that one student from the team make the entire presentation. However, all students on the team should contribute to the development of the ideas. Presentations will be made without a projector (i.e., no PowerPoint slides).

Your team may choose one of the following topics. Your team may also choose a topic that is not on the list, as long as the topic is related to computer technology and is approved beforehand by an instructor.

• Censorship in China is enabled in part by cooperation from Google, Yahoo!, and Cisco.
• There is a market for buying and selling discoveries of security vulnerabilities in popular software.
• Some computer games are addictive or encourage violent behavior.
• It is common for software manufacturers to ship software with serious, known bugs.
• Loud volumes on iPods can hurt people's hearing.
• Many people don't apply security updates, and their computers are often compromised and used for criminal activity.
• Facial recognition was used at Super Bowl XXXV to look for criminals.
• Web sites collect and share data about consumer behavior to deliver customized ads.
• Computer security researchers have discovered ways to break into electronic voting machines and change the outcome of elections.
• Peer-to-peer file sharing networks are used primarily to pirate copyrighted material.
• Peer-to-peer file sharing networks make it difficult to censor objectionable material.
• People surf the web via unsecured wireless networks (wardriving).
• Encryption algorithms may be required to have a "backdoor" that enables the government to decrypt data.
• Trusted Platform Module (TPM) can be used for digital rights management (DRM) to identify and restrict which software you run on your computer.
• Legal restrictions (e.g., Child Online Protection Act) and filtering technologies are alternative solutions for protecting minors from harmful material on the Internet.