Ethics and the Internet - Guest Lecturer - Professor Keith Miller

Hello again, and welcome to Lecture 14 in COM 333.  Our topic today is Ethics in the Internet and we have a guest lecturer,  and I want to introduce this person to you.  We have, today, Professor Keith Miller from the Computer Science Dept. here at the University of Illinois at Springfield.  His specialty areas are Software Engineering and Computer Ethics.

Ray - Welcome to COM 333, Keith

Keith - Thanks, Ray

Ray - Well, we talked just briefly before beginning this - this on line discussion - about some of the issues and you outlined a few of those for me.  You know, one of the most popular topics of discussion on the Internet is privacy.  And, uh, how do you approach that as far as an ethical issue?  I mean is privacy an issue?

Keith - Yes.  I think privacy is an issue.  Privacy has been an issue with computers for quite a while, because whenever you’re keeping data on someone, particularly when that data is electronic and can be easily merged together with information from someone else, then you got a problem with privacy.  Who owns that data?  Who can have access to that data?  Who can put the data together?  Because often we’re quite willing to give away little pieces of information to sign up for the library or to get videos and it’s not until those little snipits of information from state sources, police sources, medical sources, suddenly become available to people that we didn’t directly give permission to, to have the information and can be stuck together for either commercial or police purposes.  Suddenly our privacy is invaded, not simply because of each of the separate pieces of information we’ve given out, but instead this aggregate picture of us, which is much more revealing than we would like to reveal to anyone in general, happens kind of without our knowledge.  So this was going on without the Internet, just because of computer databases, but the Internet makes information travel fast and wide and in a rather uncontrolled manner, so computers on their own and electronic data are a major privacy concern.  The Internet has exacerbated the problem, made it more difficult to control, more difficult to detect.  Another problem with electronic privacy is the dissemination of inaccurate information.  So even if you don’t mind somebody knowing your credit history, you’d mind a lot if the credit history had an error and that error was reducing your ability to carry on commerce -- not because you were a bad credit risk, because someone thought you were a bad credit risk and it’s inaccurate.  Again, the Internet --because it gets information out their cheaply and quickly -- it means bad travels, bad news travels fast.  And it’s difficult then to protect your privacy and protect your good name really from bad information.  So, the Internet didn’t invent this problem, but it’s certainly made it a more difficult one.

Ray - Yes, I think you’re right - you know as you said it - bad news will travel quickly and far now; via the Internet, it can be around the world in a flash.

Keith - And deeply, Ray.  You know in the old days, it costs someone a lot of money to libel you effectively, now you can do it for practically nothing, and that’s the problem.

Ray - And when you mention libel, then you know one things of legal recourse, but of course, now we’re talking, perhaps, about laws in different countries.

Keith - That’s right.

Ray - And what’s libel as here might not be libel as elsewhere.

Keith - And across different states

Ray - Yeah

Keith - You know, and, and again, it’s fast, and it’s cheap, and it’s not very well regulated -- because of its nature -- and all of that makes for a difficult problems for people trying to protect their privacy.

Ray - Certainly so.  Well another area that we talked about briefly before beginning this recording is the allocation of resources -- and I guess as much as allocation acts as to the resourcer...

Keith - Sure

Ray - ...of the Internet -- and what issues do you see in that area?

Keith - There are really quite a few, Ray.  The history of the Internet is interesting intellectually, but its also interesting politically and economically.  It started out, I’m sure you’ve done some of this history of the Internet, since it started out as a government project and an intellectual kind of university research center project, and then grew into this very wide spread, very powerful economic force somewhat retaining its loosy, goosy freedom and at the same time becoming this powerful force for moving information and for commerce.  So now we have a system that is based both technically and in a regulatory fashion is based on a model really of intellectual exchange, but so much more has been piggy backed onto it.  So you know maybe some of that is good, maybe some of that is bad.  People are worried about allocation of resources in several different ways.  The first, most obvious way, is if information is power, then the Internet makes people more powerful who can get on the Internet.  But the people who can get on the Internet have the economic resources and the intellectual resources to get on the Internet probably were fairly powerful, in at least in a western society, already where as people who can’t get on the Internet because they,  for example, don’t own a computer, or can’t afford the monthly fees, or have at least reduced access in libraries, but not in their homes.  Well, they’re going to get less of that power, less of that information, so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and we’ve heard that before.  That’s true on, on a national basis; it’s true on an international basis.  We’ll be touching a little later on, on the idea of censorship.  There’s a very interesting interaction between privacy censorship and this allocation of resources.  One of the ways in which you try to level the playing field is, for example, putting terminals and Internet access in libraries.  A problem with that is all the kids can see pornography and so you want to control that.  But if you control it, what you are going to do is limit access and again, you limit access to the least powerful.  And some people who are pretty cynical about how power works in America claim that this big uproar about pornography and children, and you know all those poor children, is really a way to keep the information pour for.

Ray - I see, uh huh.

Keith - And retain their power -- and I don’t know if I’m convinced that -- that’s true, but it certainly is a secondary effect of this large concern with protecting children is an enthusiasm for censorship that is, indeed, going to block access to those that have to use public Internet access.

Ray - Well, what about that and what about the issue of protecting children?  You know, we hear an awful lot about that, and frankly, while there is inappropriate material on the Internet, there may not be quite as much as some people believe.  You know, some people believe almost everything on the Internet is inappropriate.  But how do we protect children?  And is, is that something that we should be concerned about?

Keith - I think it’s a legitimate concern.   We’ll be talking in a moment about how ethicists approach problems where there isn’t a clear cut good person, bad person.  There isn’t a clear cut: this is always right and this is always wrong.  What we have here is a conflict of goods and bads.  What we have are costs and benefits and this conflict is a thorny one because it’s, uh, both legally and ethically.  As soon as you decide that something should be removed or prohibited, then the immediate question is, well, who decides what…

Ray - Right, yeah.

Keith - …is going to be removed or prohibited and at the moment we do that at the courts with printed material and with movies, but…

Ray - nation by nation…

Keith - …nation-by-nation well, sometimes state-by-state, and county-by-county depending how the laws are.

Ray - …computers, yes

Keith - And so just logistically the Internet doesn’t allow that kind of prohibition, so that’s a practical problem, and also an ethical problem, because you know, is it right for one country to tell another country what they’re supposed to do?  So, and there are some big questions there.  And then technically things move so fast.  If you stamp it out in one place, it’ll pop up on another website somewhere else, um, and finally there’s the question of can we substitute technical and political measures for parental guidance, and some people would say if you do that it’s a mistake, and again, you have to answer the question, “who’s going to decide?”.  That power of deciding is a… brings up a further problem with the Internet -- is that we don’t have a good intellectual model yet for what kind of expression it is.  It is like a book in a library?  Is it like a movie?  Is it like telephone conversations?  Now, you know there’s probably some pretty evil things out there on the telephone right, but very few people have said we’ve got to get the police listening to all those conversations and stop it.  Because, you know,  my son might call your daughter and say something nasty to her.  Well, no one’s suggested that we should open mail and make sure there’s not pornography in it, we don’t say we should tap all the phones to make sure those teenagers don’t call each other, ‘cause we have a tradition of protecting the privacy in those really personal communications.  On the other hand, if we saw a lot of smut on network TV we would immediately say that’s not allowed, as Howard Stern will tell you.  You know, the trouble he runs into on television and on the radio says we have a different model.  We think when something’s on a television or a radio show it should be held to a higher moral standard than a telephone conversation between two people.  Now look at the Internet, which model does it fit?  Is it a broadcast?  Well kind of.  Is it a person-to-person communication?  Well kind of.  Because someone has to dial, if you will, the URL.

Ray - positive initial action

Keith - That’s right.  So you can, depending on which analogy you think is most appropriate.  You have a whole different set of legal and ethical traditions that decide whether you should or shouldn’t do censorship.  And so we are in a thing that a philosopher, who is very active in computer ethics…  His name is Jim Moore.  He calls them conceptual models.  Now, we’re still working through those conceptual models and how we decide on those really fundamental intellectual questions -- will have political and technical ramifications of how we use the Internet, or don’t use it.

Ray - And as you say, we’re really, you know, as the Internet evolves and is changing day by day, week by week, who knows what the next technology will be and it may raise even further issues that we’re going to have to address.  Well, one that we’ve talked a bit about, too, is intellectual property.  Who owns what’s on the Internet?  How can I make a copy?  Should I make a copy?  What if a book is up there?  You know what controls are there for what’s up on the Internet?

Keith - Well, at the moment, there’s not much control, either ethically or morally.  One could say a lot of people have opinions on it, but legally the legislation is still somewhat up in the air.  The courts are playing around with it, but again any court has a rather defined geographic and political boundary that the Internet doesn’t have, and even you know certainly you would think if somebody put up a…there’s currently a big problem with the CD’s being stolen, I’m saying stolen, because I’m making a moral judgment there.

Ray - Right, yeah

Keith - But say if you went into a store and physically took somebody’s say, Garth Brooks’ CD and took it home, well, we’ve pretty much decided as a society that’s a bad thing.  You have stolen.

Ray - Right, but an alternative -- if I gave you an audiocassette copy…

Keith - Um hum

Ray - …of a Perry Como CD I have, then one to one, that’s not a problem.

Keith - Yeah

Ray - Or is it?

Keith - Well…

Ray - Possibly

Keith - …It may be more of a problem for Perry Como than for you, because he can’t collect royalties.

Ray - But you know Disney, for example, has allowed you to make copies of programs -- and in fact this was in court long ago -- on videotapes that you could videotape a broadcast.  Let’s say, if I were to take something that were broadcast I could, could tape it, and then share it with you so if I’m, if I cash it…

Keith - Right, but you couldn’t sell it to me

Ray - No, no that’s correct.

Keith - Legal, yeah.

Ray - Not sell it to you, I’m not saying I’d sell, but give -- as we’re talking about this proliferation with the MP3 format and all of these tapes, if you will, or recordings are being shared.

Keith - Now this is an excellent example of what we were talking about before.  And enthusiasts do this, by the way, to play the analogy game.  Now if what is put on a web site is like a tape, then it’s probably o.k. to do it for home use.

Ray - One on one

Keith - One on one, and that’s the problem…

Ray - Not one to many…

Keith - …because if one person puts it up on the web, then everybody can get it.  And there’s also the problem in the old days when you made copies of a tape.  This is before digital tapes.  When you made a copy you would lose resolution and you would lose quality.  Now a’days with the digital media, you don’t lose anything.

Ray - That’s true.

Keith - So, is it right?  I don’t know, you could have the society say, well, so much for the commercial music business.  It’s just not going to happen anymore because its to easy to cheat.

Ray - And what happens to musicians and what happens to…

Keith - …becomes a hobby and not maybe that’s not such a bad idea, maybe they get paid too much money

Ray - That’s certainly a good question.

Keith - If they put that money into universities, I’d be just as pleased, but I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do.

Ray - But what of all the efforts?  What about all the money that they invested?  All the time?  All the creators of these things?

Keith - There you go, there you go.  So, those, those are questions we have to ask.  It can be said I think in some sense there’s nothing new under the sun, but I think as we look at these problems, these issues, it’s certainly put into a slightly different context, and that’s the conceptual model we have to work through.  We have to say OK, in this new context, how should the rules change?  What’s the fundamental right and wrong that we still believe in and how do we translate that belief about what is right and wrong into policies that are first of all ethically sensible and sensitive, but also technically practical?

Ray - And forcible right?

Keith - That’s right.

Ray - and that’s the key

Keith - and that’s a tough…

Ray - I mean really as you say, it’s a two stage process -- first you have to decide the policy…

Keith - Um hum

Ray - …what’s right.  And then you have to decide now how effectively do we enforce this.

Keith - And neither of those are easy on the Internet

Ray - Not at all

Keith - No

Ray - Not at all.  And as you say, there are so many standards, community from community and country to country, state to state.

Keith - And maybe, just maybe, in some of these issues, the fact that the Internet transcends those boundaries will bring us together…

Ray - Um hum

Keith - …you know and help us build consensus.  On the other hand, it just might tick us off and we’ll, you know, dislike each other and get angry and I know this has happened some in the international context.  There are some places, I’m thinking Singapore…

Ray - Um hum

Keith - …that simply chops the wire to the Internet and only lets what the government allows dribble in same thing with…

Ray - China

Keith - …China

Ray - China tries to whatever degree they can

Keith -…now

Ray - the very same

Keith - and some people say that technically, we’ll take care of that when we’re beaming all this stuff -- like quick satellite or microwave -- when you know and so here we go you know the technical, the ethical, and legal are not in a locked step organized kind of march when in fact we have is an interaction, a weaving in of these different factors.  Its very interesting stuff.

Ray - Oh yeah…

Keith - It’s real difficult to solve, but fund to watch.

Ray - Yeah, I think you know, and particularly because you’re talking about cultural considerations and cultural ethics, if you will, as well as the changing.  While now those may be fairly static the technology changes…

Keith - Yeah, yeah

Ray - …and a so, we’re constantly looking at a shifting image

Keith - Now you and I, Ray, are, you know, we make our living in part by being technologists and, you know, you had a phrase before and I think it’s interesting, we used it all the time that technology changes, notice how passive that is.  Well technology doesn’t just change people like you and I, like you and me, excuse me, people like you and me make decisions and those decisions are how the technology changes.  We change the technology, and an interesting part, I think, of computer ethics is to try to understand the ramifications of what we’re doing and to realize that our technical decisions and human values interact.  Very often people, wire-heads like myself, we kind of get excited about the technical problems and we try to solve those technical problems and we forget the consequences of technical decisions on the human values.  And part of computer ethics, the message, if you will, of computer ethics is to keep in mind both for the rest of society and for people who work with technology, is to keep in mind that those two things interact.

Ray - Well, and you know that brings us back to this issue of … really the market place, in part, drives the technology if there isn’t a market for it, it really doesn’t drive.

Keith - um hum

Ray - And then we have the have and have nots that you talked about

Keith - Right

Ray - In the beginning

Keith - Right

Ray - And then we begin to perpetuate the haves because there’s a market and there’s money to be made and the technology potential is great.

Keith - But notice that again that’s an economic decision based on the technical decisions we could decide.  Oh, we’re going to use this Internet, we’re going to use this technology to in fact bring the sides closer together, so for example you could make a decision, a societal decision.  We’re going to push to have very inexpensive network machines and give them to all the kids in the public schools, hasn’t happened yet…

Ray - No

Keith - …But that’s how technology could improve education.

Ray - It seems that if there’s a chicken and egg here and what comes first, the market in a sense, comes first, although technology has to be able to provide it to the market, but the market is early on in that, in that factor, or an early factor…

Keith - um hum

Ray - …in those developments, and it’s only after we tend to be reactive in setting our policies.

Keith - Oh, I think your right.  It’s interesting we’ve already mentioned the pornography and that really does come up very often.  There’s an interesting history, historical note, that very often the technology is true for the printing press, it was true for videotapes, and now it’s true for the Internet.  That pornography drives early development, technical developments in these communications media because people want to do it more quickly and profit and they can make money and at the moment, the most profitable things on the Internet, commercial entities on the Internet are pornography.  And hopefully things will mature so that more will be out there, but it’s interesting that you mentioned about how market, how technology is market driven.

Ray - …How it is market, right yeah, yeah

Keith - That, it’s, that’s been perpetuated throughout the history of media.

Ray – Well, that really leads us to electronic commerce -- and what about my credit card and back to privacy and the like?

Keith - Great technical issues, great ethical issues -- think about encryption, and this goes back to privacy.  There are technical, highly technical, highly mathematical models of how to scramble your credit card.  If someone solves that, and I’m thinking of a cracker solves that, those the technical problems of unscrambling those cheaply then electronic commerce is in trouble because you need that kind of privacy.  The same privacy, however, that you use for scrambling credit card numbers to make electronic commerce possible.  It’ll also make possible terrorists talking to each other and not being able to be a tapped by the FBI.

Ray - You use the term “crackers”, by the way, a bad hacker,

Keith - Right

Ray - A cracker is someone with ill intent, a hacker, a computer hacker, with ill intent.

Keith - Yeah, yeah a hacker would be the enthusiast, a cracker would be the enthusiast with, you know, a malignant enthusiast.  That’s the way I use the terms anyway.  Now, electronic commerce, we were talking about some secondary effects of technology.  Let’s think about the following.  Some people have started to think as electronic commerce becomes more and more popular, we’re not going to bump into each other at the grocery store anymore.  We’re not going to bump into White Oaks Mall.  We’ll be a desert, here in Springfield.  And some people think, well, maybe that’s a good thing -- all them teenagers hang out there and do bad things.  On the other hand, people say, well we’re far enough away from our neighbors already  -- if we never see their faces, is this going to lead to a better society or worse society, if we do almost all our shopping on the Internet.  Well, that’s an interesting secondary consequence and I don’t, you can argue it both ways, but I wonder if we’ve even thought about that when the Internet started to do commerce.  You know, what will be the community-building or -destroying effects?  I don’t know, it’s but it’s good to contemplate it, maybe, before we make the decision that that’s how we’re going to do all of our shopping.

Ray - Yeah, I think your right, but again as you said to this point we’re reactive, not proactive,with policies with setting an ethical framework.

Keith - Um hum

Ray - We don’t establish, in general, it doesn’t appear that we’ve established, an ethical standard and then developed the technology to implement it, but rather, we’ve let the marketplace drive this largely, and technology following the market and then, and then it posts back to, oh, and then we say, oh we may have crossed the lines here.

Keith - And since the technology moves so fast that can be a very dangerous thing to do now.  Deborah Johnson, another prominent philosopher in computer ethics, has warned us that we shouldn’t think of the technological imperatives as inevitable, that - that is, seeding to the technology our decisions about right or wrong.  And she says well we just have to work faster and harder at working out these conceptual models and we have to get to it, you know, we have to not allow ourselves to be just dragged along.  Because not making a decision is making a decision and allowing market forces to decide what’s right and wrong.  She’s terribly worried about that.

Ray - Well, that brings us to the point of how do we?  You know what context?  How do we apply these ethical standards?  I mean how do you even begin?  What guidelines are there for ethics and…

Keith - um hum

Ray -…and the Internet or technology in general?

Keith - It’s an excellent question.  I can’t give you a quick answer, but I think what I’ll try to do in just a couple of moments here with your class is to suggest that some of the ideas the philosophers have guessed, particularly applied philosophers have been working on for thousands of years, can be applied to these questions can help us work through the conceptual modes.  And I’ll just give you 3 slogans that people have called from philosophy that can be used, and then talk about, you know, applying these principles, if you will.  Going back to a guy named Mill, a turn-of-the-century philosopher.  He talked about the greatest good for the greatest number.  It’s a consequentialist utilitarian idea and, you know, I won’t bore you with all the details, but the idea is saying an act is right or good, correct ethically moral, if you will, whenever that act has good consequences, or more good consequences than bad consequences, and exactly how you do the calculus of adding these things up turns out to be pretty tough, as you can imagine, because human values are hard to quantify, but the basic principle is you judge an act on whether or not the consequences give goodness, or sometimes and they’ll use the word happiness, for most people.  There are both ethical and philosophical problems with that.  For example, maybe having a few slaves is a good idea, if everybody else is made happy by having a few slaves, if the calculus adds up to more happiness for the non-slaves by having few slaves, maybe you could justify slavery.  Now a lot of people who are enthusiasts of utilitarians, say no you could never do that.  You know, it wouldn’t work out because we’ll get to decide who’s a slave, but so you can see that there might be a problem there making happiness or goodness the final arbiter of what’s right and wrong so, kind of opposed to that another camp, if you will, in philosophy is the oncologists, who say it’s not just the consequences, well, in fact, sometimes you can’t, first of all, you can’t predict all those consequences, they say no, let’s not talk about the consequences, we’ll focus on the act itself.  And they’ll say that act is either right or wrong and then the question is right or wrong because of what, well, maybe because the Bible says so, or maybe the Koran says so, maybe because you feel that it’s right or wrong, all those would be possibilities that would be different from looking at the consequences, but some, many philosophers, say, well, I don’t want to just make it a matter of opinion and ethics is not religion, we have to work this out.  Maybe, we want to be ethical to each other, even if we have a different religion.  So are there some kind of rules we can use, other than this greatest good for the greatest number, that will help us decide whether something’s good or bad.  Well, then Kant came up with what he called categorical imperatives, and a trying to read Kants and Germens way beyond me, but I’ll give you one way in which one of his rules could be restated -- he says “never treat a human as a merely a means to an end.”  And the emphasis there is treat people with respect, you know, they are intrinsically valuable things in a world of people.  We shouldn’t value people.  That doesn’t mean you can’t, the word merely - there is real important, ‘cause if I hire you I’m gonna use you, but as long as I treat you humanly as an employee, you know and I, that can still be an ethical thing to do we can still work together but if I use you up and throw you away if you will, then I will of a violated Kahn’s categorical imperative.  So now we got two different ethical rules and you know a lot of ethical cases they come up with the same answer but there are cases where they come up with different answers.  For example, slavery would clearly be no good for Kahn.  You know whereas you might make some perverted argument, a utilitarian argument that might say slavery would be o.k.  So, I’ll give you another test and this one’s a little less formal and its roots are perhaps less in the philosophy world then kind of a rule of thumb, but it’s another one that can be used to try and look at what you do on the net and what you do with computer information, for example, and that is the publicity test.  You’re not, by the publicity test says well, if you aren’t sure if something’s right or wrong, would you mind if everybody new you did it.  Ok if your not proud of it worry…

Ray - um hum

Keith - …and that’s maybe a kind of a rule of thumb that we’re all familiar with, but it gives you another perspective on what you can do and not.  So there are 3 different ideas.  There are lots of other ideas, and there are certainly sophistications of these ideas that we can’t go into in a short interview, but I guess what I could say to your class is I know I came at this as a technologist.  I was a software engineer, I still am, that’s kind of my day job, but I got interested in computer ethics cause I kept running into problems in developing software that I really couldn’t answer doing any equations or computer science principles, because of this interaction of technical decisions and human values, and so I started looking into, well, I’ll give you the pyridine example from my work -- is how good is good enough, that is, computer programs, and this includes stuff that goes up on the web and the Internet.  Computer programs are getting so inherently complex that we simply cannot guarantee their correctness.  We can work on them longer, and longer, and longer to remove more and more of the problems and get more and more confident that it won’t fail too often and too disastrously, but we can never be absolutely certain.  Well, there’s a dilemma, you know if I’m gonna put this thing out on the ‘net or if I’m gonna sell you a program that’s your browser -- how long should I test it before I feel confident enough to sell it to you,  because maybe if it fails, something bad will happen to you and maybe I’ll be responsible for that.  On the other hand, if I test it forever and never release it, it won’t do any good to anybody.  So uh…

Ray - The greatest good for the greatest…

Keith - Maybe it’s the greatest good for the greatest number,

Ray - Yes

Keith - …On the other hand, maybe I’ll just get out of the business because I can’t do it humanly.  So, anyway, I think in a lot of these issues you can look at it in different ways, but you have to be a little more educated about how to think about human values, before I think you can make some good judgments, which requires you to take my course in computer ethics, obviously.

Ray - Good point, and in fact, Keith offers both graduate and undergraduate courses in computer ethics.

Keith - At the moment, I’ve got a computer ethics course online.

Ray - That’s great, that’s great.  Dr. Keith Miller, thank you so much for joining us.

Keith - Well, thanks for having me, Ray, that was good.

Keith - That was great.  And a class, don’t forget to visit all the links and then answer the question of the week and I’ll talk to you again next week.