20.10. You work for a software company that has developed a system that provides information about consumers and that is used within a SoS by a number of other retail businesses. They pay you for the services used. Discuss the ethics of changing the system interfaces without notice to coerce users into paying higher charges. Consider this question from the point of view of the company’s employees, customers, and shareholders.
This question is worded confusingly, so my translation is thus:
- Employees == The people working on the service and developing it.
- Customers -> Clients == The companies which are utilizing the service and paying to do so.
- none -> Customers == The people who are being tracked by this system.
- Shareholders == The people who have a financial interest in the success of the company making this decision.
Employees:
Anyone who knowingly works on an unethical project is themselves unethical. Anyone with a computer science degree doesn’t have an excuse for not knowing. Ethics aside, though, employees will have to ensure they don’t go down for this when it all goes wrong. They have two options; get written proof that what they’re being asked to do is exactly as they believe, and/or quit. The proof is a good idea either way, because if this goes poorly for the company, they’ll be looking for someone to blame.
Clients:
Coercion isn’t ethical. This is how you lose clients, who might decide that instead of paying you more and having to redo the work re-implementing your service, they’d rather not. They might even replace your system with that of a competitor; after all, they have to redesign their interfaces either way. This gets even more complicated if you are part of an organizational or federated SoS; the other companies who provide the other services (which collectively form the SoS that the client utilizes) may have rights, and your company might have responsibilities to those other member providers that are not being respected with this action. If your company is unilaterally acting against the interests of the Organization in an organizational SoS, then I would expect backlash; not just the replacement in the SoS of your service with that of another company, but the possibility of the organization blacklisting your company from other projects as well.
Customers:
Tracking and redistributing customers’ personal data isn’t ethical. By being so blatant with your fleecing of this data, you are making enemies who might bring to the attention of the court system that you are profiting off data which isn’t strictly speaking yours. Laws regarding the rights of an individual over their own personal data have lagged behind technology; you might make history in helping those laws catch up.
Shareholders:
Shareholders in this business are investing in an openly unethical business. They should either influence the company to make better choices, or move their investments elsewhere. While this action may appear immediately profitable, the short term gains for the company will be outweighed by the long-term effect of bad business and acting in bad faith. Investors might not care about ethics, but they will care when bad ethics lead to loss of clients, or worse, lawsuits. That said, this direction might have come from the shareholders, as they are frequently the least scrupulous and most profit-focused. They might even intend to scupper the ship deliberately if it aligns with their other interests, or if they want to sell their shares during the initial bubble for maximum personal profits. Such activities might be unethical and despicable, but they’re predictable nonetheless.