Reference no: EM132732593

MN501 Network Management in Organisations - Melbourne Institute of Technology

Ethical issues arising from use of ICT technologies

Learning Outcome 1: Analyse ethical, professional standards and codes of practice in relation to ICT systems;

Learning Outcome 2: Understand the importance of team work, collaboration and life-long learning in the workplace.

Assignment Description

Students will be assigned in a group of five (5) students from the same laboratory class. You must not change your group unless approved by your tutor. Please select one of the topics below and inform your tutor the topic you have chosen. Group must elect a group leader and only one submission per group is required on Moodle.
All students must collaborate on this group assignment and contribute equally. Group leader should report their progress on a regular basis to the relevant tutor. Every student must participate in peer assessment on the SPARKPLUS system after submission on Moodle. SPARKPLUS Guide for students will be available on Moodle.

Part 1:

In this section, you need to find an online article that discussed privacy/security breaches involving
wearables or wearable technologies.

Provide screen shot of the online article and provide a succinct summary of the issue presented in this article and its importance. Use ethical reasoning to support your views (10 marks)

Case Study topics for Assignment-2.

Case Study Topic 1:

"You are a sole practitioner who used to provide a range of accountancy services for a small company (Company
A) that owns a hardware shop in the town where you practise. Following a brief retendering process, the client chose to engage an alternative firm of accountants. Both you and the other firm had been asked to tender for a range of services, including the preparation of year end accounts, tax compliance work, and a due diligence exercise in respect of the intended purchase of a small hardware business in the neighbouring town. You believe that you were unsuccessful in the tendering process on the basis of cost alone, as Company A is not very profitable, and suffers from the competition of the other hardware business that it intends to acquire. You are the continuity provider for another local sole practitioner. Two months ago he suffered a heart attack, and so you are currently acting for a number of his clients. He is not expected to resume practising for another two months. One of the clients of the incapacitated practitioner (Company B) operates a shop selling electrical goods. The director and majority shareholder has called you to arrange a meeting to discuss a business venture that he is considering. At the meeting, the client explains that he intends to make an offer for the same small hardware business that Company A is seeking to acquire. He is aware that there is another bidder for the business, but is unaware that it is Company A, or that Company A used to be your client. When the meeting is over, you start to feel uneasy. You want to help Company B and provide a valued service on behalf of the practitioner for whom you are the continuity provider. But you realise that you are also in possession of confidential information concerning the plans of your previous client. You are aware of Company A's problems and its motivation for wishing to acquire the business".

Case Study Topic 2:

"On September 8, 2016, Wells Fargo, one of the nation's oldest and largest banks, admitted in a settlement with regulators that it had created as many as two million accounts for customers without their permission. This was fraud, pure and simple. It seems to have been caused by a culture in the bank that made unreasonable demands upon employees. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million in fines and penalties. Employees had been urged to "cross-sell." If a customer had one type of account with Wells Fargo, then top brass reasoned, they should have several. Employees were strongly incentivized, through both positive and negative means, to sell as many different types of accounts to customers as possible. "Eight is great" was a motto. But does the average person need eight financial products from a single bank? As things developed, when employees were unable to make such sales, they just made the accounts up and charged customers whether they had approved the accounts or not. The employees used customers' personal identification numbers without their knowledge to enroll them in various products without their knowledge. Victims were frequently elderly or Spanish speakers.

Matthew Castro, whose father was born in Colombia, felt so bad about pushing sham accounts onto Latino customers than he tried to lessen his guilt by doing volunteer work. Other employees were quoted as saying "it's beyond embarrassing to admit I am a current employee these days."

Still other employees were moved to call company hotlines or otherwise blow the whistle, but they were simply ignored or oftentimes punished, frequently by being fired. One employee who sued to challenge retaliation against him was "uncomfortable" and "unsettled" by the practices he saw around him, which prompted him to speak out. "This is a fraud, I cannot be a part of that," the whistleblower said.

Early prognostications were that CEO John Stumpf would not lose his job over the fiasco. However, as time went on and investigations continued, the forms and amount of wrongdoing seemed to grow and grow. Evidence surfaced that the bank improperly changed the terms of mortgage loans, signed customers up for unauthorized life insurance policies, overcharged small businesses for credit-card processing, and on and on.

In September of 2016, CEO Stumpf appeared before Congress and was savaged by Senators and Representatives of both parties, notwithstanding his agreement to forfeit $41 million in pay. The members of Congress denounced Wells Fargo's actions as "theft," "a criminal enterprise," and an "outrage." Stumpf simultaneously took "full responsibility," yet blamed the fraud on ethical lapses of low-level bankers and tellers. He had, he said, led the company with courage. Nonetheless, by October of 2016 Stumpf had been forced into retirement and replaced by Tim Sloan.

Over the next several months, more and more allegations of wrongdoing arose. The bank had illegally repossessed cars from military veterans. It had modified mortgages without customer authorization. It had charged 570,000 customers for auto insurance they did not need. It had ripped off small businesses by charging excessive credit card fees. The total number of fake accounts rose from two million to 3.5 million. The bank also wrongly fined 110,000 mortgage clients for missing a deadline even though the party at fault for the delay was Wells Fargo itself.

At its April 2017 annual shareholders meeting, the firm faced levels of dissent that a Georgetown business school professor, Sandeep Dahiya, called "highly unusual."

By September, 2017, Wells Fargo had paid $414 million in refunds and settlements and incurred hundreds of millions more in attorneys' and other fees. This included $108 million paid to the Department of Veterans Affairs for having overcharged military veterans on mortgage refinancing.

In October 2017, new Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan was told by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, that he should be fired: "You enabled this fake-account scandal. You got rich off it, and then you tried to cover it up." Republicans were equally harsh. Senator John Kennedy Texas said: "I'm not against big. With all due respect, I'm against dumb."

Sloan was still CEO when the company had its annual shareholders meeting in April 2018. Shareholder and protestors were both extremely angry with Wells Fargo. By then, the bank had paid an additional $1 billion fine for abuses in mortgage and auto lending. And, in an unprecedented move, the Federal Reserve Board had ordered the bank to cap its asset growth. Disgust with Wells Fargo's practices caused the American Federation of Teachers, to cut ties with the bank. Some whistleblowers resisted early attempts at quiet settlements with the bank, holding out for a public admission of wrongdoing.

In May 2018, yet another shoe dropped. Wells Fargo's share price dropped on news that the bank's employees improperly altered documents of its corporate customers in an attempt to comply with regulatory directions related to money laundering rules.

Ultimately, Wells Fargo removed its cross-selling sales incentives. CEO Sloan, having been informed that lower level employees were suffering stress, panic attacks, and other symptoms apologized for the fact that management initially blamed them for the results of the toxic corporate culture, admitting that cultural weaknesses had caused a major morale problem".

Case Study Topic 3:

"The Therac-25 machine was a state-of-the-art linear accelerator developed by the company Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL) and a French company CGR to provide radiation treatment to cancer patients. The Therac- 25 was the most computerized and sophisticated radiation therapy machine of its time. With the aid of an onboard computer, the device could select multiple treatment table positions and select the type/strength of the energy selected by the operating technician. AECL sold eleven Therac-25 machines that were used in the United States and Canada beginning in 1982.

Unfortunately, six accidents involving significant overdoses of radiation to patients resulting in death occurred between 1985 and 1987 (Leveson & Turner 1993). Patients reported being "burned by the machine" which some technicians reported, but the company thought was impossible. The machine was recalled in 1987 for an extensive redesign of safety features, software, and mechanical interlocks. Reports to the manufacturer resulted in inadequate repairs to the system and assurances that the machines were safe. Lawsuits were filed, and no investigations took place. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) later found that there was an inadequate reporting structure in the company, to follow up with reported accidents.

There were two earlier versions of the Therac-25 unit: the Therac-6 and the Therac-20, which were built from the CGR company's other radiation units-Neptune and Sagittaire. The Therac-6 and Therac-20 units were built with a microcomputer that made the patient data entry more accessible, but the units were operational without an onboard computer. These units had built-in safety interlocks and positioning guides, and mechanical features that prevented radiation exposure if there was a positioning problem with the patient or with the components of the machine. There was some "base duplication" of the software used from the Therac-20 that carried over to the Therac-25. The Therac-6 and Therac-20 were clinically tested machines with an excellent safety record. They relied primarily on hardware for safety controls, whereas the Therac-25 relied primarily on software.

On February 6, 1987, the FDA placed a shutdown on all machines until permanent repairs could be made. Although the AECL was quick to state that a "fix" was in place, and the machines were now safer, that was not the case. After this incident, Leveson and Turner (1993) compiled public information from AECL, the FDA, and various regulatory agencies and concluded that there was inadequate record keeping when the software was designed. The software was inadequately tested, and "patches" were used from earlier versions of the machine. The premature assumption that the problem(s) was detected and corrected was unproven. Furthermore, AECL had great difficulty reproducing the conditions under which the issues were experienced in the clinics. The FDA restructured its reporting requirements for radiation equipment after these incidents.

As computers become more and more ubiquitous and control increasingly significant and complex systems, people are exposed to increasing harms and risks. The issue of accountability arises when a community expects its agents to stand up for the quality of their work. Nissenbaum (1994) argues that responsibility in our computerized society is systematically undermined, and this is a disservice to the community. This concern has grown with the number of critical life services controlled by computer systems in the governmental, airline, and medical arenas.

According to Nissenbaum, there are four barriers to accountability: the problem of many hands, "bugs" in the system, the computer as a scapegoat, and ownership without liability. The problem of too many hands relates to the fact that many groups of people (programmers, engineers, etc.) at various levels of a company are typically involved in creation of a computer program and have input into the final product. When something goes wrong, there is no one individual who can be clearly held responsible. It is easy for each person involved to rationalize that he or she is not responsible for the final outcome, because of the small role played. This occurred with the Therac- 25 that had two prominent software errors, a failed microswitch, and a reduced number of safety features compared to earlier versions of the device. The problem of bugs in the software system causing errors in machines under certain conditions has been used as a cover for careless programming, lack of testing, and lack of safety features built into the system in the Therac-25 accident. The fact that computers "always have problems with their programming" cannot be used as an excuse for overconfidence in a product, unclear/ambiguous error messages, or improper testing of individual components of the system. Another potential obstacle is ownership of proprietary software and an unwillingness to share "trade secrets" with investigators whose job it is to protect the public (Nissenbaum 1994).

The Therac-25 incident involved what has been called one of the worst computer bugs in history (Lynch 2017), though it was largely a matter of overall design issues rather than a specific coding error. Therac-25 is a glaring example of what can go wrong in a society that is heavily dependent on technology".

Attachment:- Network Management in Organisations.rar