Ethical Implications of Information System Management

It is important to distinguish between ethical and legal implications of information system management in a way that unlike legal issues, ethical issues do not necessarily result in the organisations being punished by law; nevertheless, unethical behaviour can have highly negative implications for the society.

Ethical implications of information system management cover a wide range of issues such as disclosure of information to third parties, accuracy of information, information ownership issues, appropriate access to information and others.

Moreover, increasing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the global scale are proving to be another source of information system management ethical issues. Specifically, “a number of information system companies have sprung up to provide products designed to monitor social media” (Stair and Reynolds, 2011, p.30) and this practice is attracting criticism from various parties for being contradictory form ethical viewpoint. Critics argue that information posted in social networking sites are private and firms do not possess ethical rights to use this information for marketing and other purposes.

References

Stair, R & Reynolds, G. (2011) “Principles of Information Systems” Cengage Learning