HW 2: Professional Ethics and Privacy

Assigned: 8 April 2014.  Due: 15 April 2014 at 17:00

The ACM is the professional society for computer scientists and information technologists.  Find the ACM code of Ethics on the ACM website.  Read it.

Read Chapter 2 of Baase. Take one example of an ethically-dubious actions situation in the chapter, and analyze it using the ACM Code of Ethics.  Does the code have anything to say about this situation?  Which sections of the code does it violate, if any?   Would Social Contract Theory, or Act Utilitarianism, treat the same episode differently?

Your essay in answer to this question should be between 300 and 400 words.  Start by summarizing the situation: don't assume that the reader already knows about it.  Strive to be objective while reciting the facts;  then describe how you see the ACM code applying.  Throughout, strive to separate your opinions and surmizes from facts and undisputed informaiton.  Cite your sources (your bibliographic citations are not included in the word limit). 

When submitting your assignment (to the dropbox on D2L), please follow these rules:
  1. Submit a PDF document. Not a Microsoft Word document, not a text file.  Having all of the documents in PDF makes it much easier for us to print them all out.
  2. Put your name at the top of your essay.  D2L doesn't do this; it really helps in assigning your grades to know who wrote the paper!
  3. Avoid plagiarism.  Minimal re-writing of source text is not OK.  The whole essay should be your own work, except for explicit quotations.
  4. Wikipedia is not an appropriate reference source.  If a Wikipedia article references a source, you should check the source to make sure that it really states what is claimed.  Then cite the original source.  If a Wikipedia article does not reference a source, you probably should not believe it.

This is the grading rubric that we will be using.