Review: Code of Ethics for Programmers?

Do computer professionals need a code of ethics? As the computing industry grows, argue two experts on the social aspects of computing, so do the many ethical dilemmas facing people who create, design and sell software and hardware. I'll second that idea: computing is getting some of the worst publicity around, and more and more of it is deserved. This is the second in a series of essays based on "Technology and the Future," edited by Albert Teich and published by Bedford/St.Martin's.

Computers may have ushered in a social and economic revolution, but they don't necessarily signify an advance in the world's ethical life.

Stealing other people's work is almost a hobby on the Net, where copying isn't seen as a crime, but as an inalienable right. Geeks and nerds routinely brag about their software snatches, purloined gaming and music libraries and free upgrades.

Programmers frequently come up with products that are buggy, excessive, unworkable, unsupportable or overpriced. The industry's consumers are exploited and abused.

Online, cruelty and hostility are points of pride, civility and respect rare virtues.

While people all over the world have been quick to embrace computing, they've been slower to consider its moral implications. The explosion of computer technology, its sudden rise, and its susceptibility to misuse and malfunction have raised a slew of unresolved ethical, social and legal issues.

The Net's builders - engineers, nerds, academics and geeks of the 60s and 70s - talked a lot about freedom, accessibility, and openness; they believed in information as a tool for improving the human condition. They would be flabbergasted, three decades later, to learn that entertainment has become the Net's primary draw. According to Cyber Dialogue, more than 43 million users -70 per cent of all Americans online - were using the Web for sports, movies, TV, music or gaming.

As is often typical in visionary social movements, the real world tends to set in brutally. The leaders of today's computing industry today talk a lot more about bandwidth, hardware, and IPO's than about changing the world.

As for other leaders, Congress is much too busy exploiting political concerns about dirty pictures to focus on real moral problems - and by now, nobody would really want Congressional input into the life of the Net and the Web, anyway, especially when it comes to ethics.

So although there are scads of ethical people in the computing business and online - many engaged in downright noble endeavors - computing is still raw, wild, and ethically unformed. Along with the honorable values found online - freedom, sharing, creating - there are plenty of dark ones.

"Computer Ethics," by Tom Forester and Perry Morrison, is one of the most provocative essays in Albert Teich's collection of writings about issues raised by the spread of new technology. There could hardly be a more timely subject. There is nothing approaching a consensus on computing ethics, even as the number of Americans using the Internet rockets past the 100 million mark.

The ease with which even minimally-skilled Net users can copy software, for instance, presents millions of people with ethical dilemmas weekly. Ethicists have argued that copying software is blatant theft, yet the easy transmission of software also challenges long-held ideas about who can and should own information.

Is copying software wrong? Are some kinds of copying more ethical than others?

Hacking and cracking are defined differently all over the Net and Web; some see hacking as harmless fun while cracking is criminal, but an increasing number of people view both activities as equivalent to fraud or theft.

What about the behavior of computer users online? People can act arrogantly, even viciously, ignorantly asserting opinions and spreading misinformation, attacking different views, ridiculing the helpless, driving newcomers away. Websites routinely tolerate behavior that would be prohibited or curtailed in almost any other other context.

Within the computer industry itself, there are by- now- entrenched patterns of unethical corporate behavior. Few companies involved in the creation or maintenance of computers or programs take any real responsibility for what they sell or how it works. Accordingly, few Net users are without horror stories to tell about squandered money or malfunctioning equipment.

Computers are often badly - even unethically -- sold, with pricey and unnecessary equipment foisted on unknowing consumers; technical support remains a nightmare of near-extortionate "incident" plans and delays, with often poorly-trained, overwhelmed staff. In most companies, some of the most important employees, especially in terms of public perception - Help Desk geeks - have the lowest status and salaries.

Computer software is constructed to invade privacy, record personal tastes and habits, share unauthorized information, and market personal information in ever-widening circles and ways.

It's hard to think of any other business with so horrid a record of abusing its customers. Public disgust and resentment over the way computers are sold, and the way the machines work (or don't) help create a climate in which government regulation and intervention becomes more politically appealing. As computers become more central, they tend to be blamed for more and more problems - pornography, isolation, addiction, hate-mongering. Computers get an even worse PR rap these days than politicians.

Although much of this publicity is false or overblown, computing reinforces the disturbing notion that technology often rushes ahead of our ability to deal coherently - or ethically - with it. That in turn breeds mistrust and suspicion.

Who, exactly, bears responsibility for bugs? For system crashes? For the equitable distribution of technology?

The truth is, we have no idea. And it's all only going to get more ethically complicated.

Computer- driven studies in artificial intelligence and genomes have raised staggering question marks - some having to do with the nature of life itself - though they receive far less political or media attention than the occasional media-sensationalized computer virus.

Because computing is a relatively new field, Forester and Morrison write, the profession has lacked the time or organizational capacity to establish a set of moral rules or ethics the way more entrenched professions like medicine or law have. Computing and its many subsets - such as programming and software engineering - haven't yet emerged as a full-fledged profession. They also plead that computer educators teach ethics; that they make students aware of the social problems caused by computers and the kinds of moral choices programmers and designers will face at work.

"Computer professionals face all sorts of ethical dilemmas in their everyday work life," write Forester and Morrison. "First, although they have obligations to their employers, to the customers, to their co-professionals, and to the general public, these obligations often come into conflict."

How should a systems analyst respond if her employer insists on selling overengineered, unnecessarily expensive or otherwise inadequate systems to unknowing customers? Should computer professionals care when they see intellectual or property rights being infringed upon? How should a computer professional deal with the daily barrage of issues involving intellectual property?

Do non-professionals online have any ethical responsibilities at all? Movements like free software and Open Source advocate the sharing, distribution, use and re-use of software, a moral position in conflict with traditional notions of ownership. Yet online, it's almost a moral imperative to thwart corporate efforts to curb information, as when the WB network foolishly postponed the season finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in the post-Columbine hysteria and fans downloaded it all over the Net.

Technically, the "Buffy" fans were stealing the WB's property. Can't a network programming exec air what he or she has bought any time he or she pleases, for any reason at all? Yet in this case, the theft seemed more ethical than the hypocritical decision to postpone the broadcast.

Similiarly, the music industry is in near-meltdown over unpaid MP3 downloads and other forms of piracy. Yet the record companies - one of the world's larger cartels outside Colombia - were due some comeuppance for their arrogance, greed and control over music. In the age of the market-driven mega-corporation, it sometimes does seem more ethical to steal than to pay.

For now, online ethics remain personal and individualistic. Certain values predominate in some quarters - information-sharing, a common interest in protecting freedom, an increasingly rationalist approach to political and informational issues. But how to implement those values in any particular situation is left up to the individual, a hit-or-miss proposition in a culture with tens of millions of people and tens of thousands of newcomers every day.

Professional organizations like the ACM (Associatiion of Computing Machinery), the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the British Computer Society (BCS) and IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) have all worked to create codes of ethics and professional conduct. Few of these codes are widely known and embraced.

But there are broad ethical principles that many computer users and builders can rally around. Here's a few starters:

• Opportunity. People who work in computers might work for the equitable distribution of technology, so that computer users don't become a powerful elite in control of a culture that excludes the technologically illiterate, a social nightmare already well underway.

• Responsibility. People who make technology need to consider its social implications, applications and consequences.
• Access. Unfettered access to the Internet, its information unrestricted and unregulated by corporations or government except in the most dire circumstances.
• Civics. Democracy and inclusion, using network computing to break down elites, to bring more people into the political process, provide them more information, and give them new ways to express their opinions and attitudes.
• Civility. Another ethical goal might be a civil society online - especially a new kind of media -- where information is gathered and shared openly, solutions are approached rationally rather than ideologically, facts replace confrontation and dogma, argument is encouraged but personal attacks viewed as the unethical assaults on the free movement of ideas that they are.

And where corporations, designers, programmers and engineers take responsibility for the things they make and the way they work and are used.

---

Next - Part Three: The Coming Of The Perfect Baby

Re:Don't f*** anyone over.

bloated software

One person's "bloat" is another's "feature." Yes Windows is bloated, and they're getting their asses handed to them in the server market, where bloat is not acceptable. But for most home users, Windows is still a better choice than any of the non-bloated OS's.

winmodems

This may be news to you, but not everyone has an unlimited supply of money. Winmodems are cheap. Yes they are also cheap hacks, but they get the job done.

two meg video cards

WTF? How is it unethical to sell this? Again, not everyone has unlimited money, and a 2 meg video card is better than a 1 meg video card.

14 inch monitors

So now it's a crime against humanity if you are forced to look at anything smaller than 17 inches? I'm looking at a 15-inch monitor right now, and I don't feel explointed.

What does 'a code of ethics' really mean?

If the question is, "Ought people behanve ethically?" then the answer is obvious -- because 'ethically' is how we define the way people ought to act.

If the question is "Should people require licensure to legally create / sell software, and should that licensure be predicated in part on a loyalty oath to a document we'll draft some academics to draft using all of today coolest buzzwords and moral posturing?" the answer is a big flat No.

By naming a few reasons why that No should stand, I do not mean to imply that this list is complete, but ...

• It would add barriers to entry to one of the only careers / endeavors that is open to those who study it. Why burden something that is currently open to people of a wide age range, and does not (inherently) discriminate based on looks or sex with layers of officious officialdom? "Mmmm, guilds."
  
• Attested-to codes of ethics are about as useful and meaningful as ... what? Confessions to the Spanish Inquisition?
  
• The existence of codified codes of ethics is one thing, but the expectation that people should ssear allegiance to a particular one increases the development cycle of each individual's code.
  

As a note, when my mom went to med school, her school (Johns Hopkins) specifically did *not* feature the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors who wish to profess that oath are still free to, of course, but would you really think your doctor was more or less ethical based on whether they publically declared their allegience to a given code?

thoughts,

timothy

Eth-Eth-Ethics

The reason for buggy code is simple: most programmers have never had access to state of the art debugging software and tools. We're out using emacs, vi, gcc, and libraries we pull off freshmeat. For the windows side - they're stuck using buggy MFC code. The state of the art.. well.. isn't.

We need good tools to do good work. It's a miracle that we have an abundance of stable free software despite not having access to these tools. That should speak volumes for the capability and skill of the current generation of programmers.

Now, on the issue of ethics - programmers, and geeks at large, already have them. They just don't match up what society wants us to have as ethics. We mistrust authority, promote decentralization, and only offer respect based on competence - not authority. As such... it's only natural that people on the other side of the fence would be clamoring for changes.

Be careful what you wish for - you may just get it. If we don't have programmers exploring all the details of programmable systems - both the good and the bad, we leave ourselves in a kind of technological dark age. Certain knowledge is forbidden, and those that pursue it are persecuted and jailed. One might argue we're getting close to that now...

--

Public Opinion

"Dear tech support,
I refuse to RTFM, I don't know what I'm doing, I can't use your software.
Therefore, I'm reporting you to the BBB!!!"

Yes, that's only one side of the coin, and the other is equally ugly. But...

The quality of something is defined by the perception held by the customer. People expect cars to have 'glitches'. Peeling trim, creaky doors and burning oil are all part and parcel of buying a used car. Malignant problems are not.

Many people, especially those who are not very knowledgable about the inner workings of computers or the process of programming, percieve computers as magical creatures, not far removed from unicorns. That, and their very own, household piece of rocket science. Folks who routinely do less-than-knowledgable things to their computers, and then wonder why the PC crashes without understanding the reason, walk away from the experience with the perception of poor quality.

Much like a brand new driver who slams a car into reverse while rolling forward (fast) because it works on TV... They learn that transmissions are expensive, and no complaining to the BBB will change that.

Software is much more forgiving. But one can still complain to the BBB about the computer that crashed and caused a loss of data - regardless of the fact that in all common-sense, the user could have prevented the event with informed usage.

Yes, we all know that many software developers, especially the cutting-edge, smaller than 'big' ones, cut corners severely. They need the money, so they sell the product before it's ready.

Many are more consciencious than this, but it is impossible to perform truly thorough testing. All user actions, and all software interactions, can not be anticipated. And making software bullet-proof results in either very limited use environments (embedded etc.) or piss-poor performance. So these folks, understandably, test for reasonable, average abuse. This is of course in the off-the-shelf arena.

I'm a relatively informed computer user. I use MS products as amatter of fact and need, and frankly, my computer has not crashed (blue-screened, frozen, lost data) in years. I do not beat the crap out of it, I scan over the manuals.

I change the oil and filters, I rotate the tires and do other routine maintenance, and my used car runs just fine.

Finally, yes, there are scheisters out there looking for a quick buck. They range from small time schemers, to concerted rip-off artists a'la Syncronys Softcorp. There are ignorant users out there who shout "rip-off" whenever the power goes out. If there were "lemon laws" on software, you'd have to have them on every little piece of consumer goods sold in the world. Consider the overhead.

The reason this is not necessary is the fact that consumers learn and adapt. Once burned, you're less likely to grab for the stove - and Linux is doing great because of this. This is where 'reputation' comes in, and regulation goes out. Reputation may be built on marketting at first, but it can not last without a company's inner ethic and quality control. Outside control hurts reputation.

Ow! I've now got blisters on my fingers!

Re:Go Away Katz

It strikes me that people here are often, maybe even usually, rude. Your post is an excellent example. You even go so far as to blame it on OTHER people for being 'thin-skinned'. (!)

Telling the truth is a good thing. Calling someone names, most of the time, is not. It amazes me how hostile people have become online, and yet how blind they seem to their own hostility.

And he's right about the industry abusing its customers. Microsoft is our favorite example. They write code to make money: security and stability be dammed. Many people even praise them for this... making money, to these people, is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing.

When does it become enough? Microsoft has on the order of 25 billion sitting in the bank. Why don't they take the time to really push the boundaries of what computing is a little bit? Do a little bit of what open source does -- improve computers for everyone, just because it's the right thing to do.

It strikes me that one of the fundamental points of computer ethics is to write software that is secure. Almost nobody I know of does this with their programs. OpenBSD is *the only* operating system I know that has stressed security and code correctness from the beginning. (Netware may be another; it is quite secure, but I do not know what Novell's internal practices are like. )

Respect and tolerance are two more points I think should be taken up by a great many more /.'ers. I have rarely seen such arrogance. Back when it was young, a couple years ago, the expertise you could find here was genuine, and the flaming generally was merited. Nowadays, it's just a bunch of angry teenagers who flame first, think second. The same expert people are here, but their voices are mostly drowned out in the clamor of the angry amateur wannabes. Lots of ego, not much to back it up.

The hate that is so often spewed here will break up the open source movement before it ever really gets started. Each time you post something that blasts another person, you do a bit more damage to the community as a whole. Sometimes it's necessary, but there is absolutely no reason to blast Katz. It does no good, and causes harm to the overall community.

Strikes me that most of the people doing it are falling prey to the exact same pettiness they almost universally loathe and despise in others, at school and in other RL places. 'Get out, you don't belong here, you're Not One Of Us'... implying that the person who is saying it IS.

It is so very sad that the people who are tormented and abused most -- the geeks -- do the same thing to people who aren't exactly like them.

"How can we be in, if there is no outside." -- Peter Gabriel

Computers are no different

The Computer field is not fundamentally different than any other field. Every career, whether it is medicine, automobile repair, livery, or telephone operator gives you an opportunity to choose whether to help, or to harm someone.

Doctors could get away with quite a bit, if driven to evil. (I think I saw a piece on one of those prime time news shows some months back.) Auto mechanics can make up repairs, or lie about maintenance schedules to take extra money from an unsuspecting customer. Even the telephone operator, who for some reason decides he doesn't want to look up my brother's number in Cleveland, and instead tells me there's no record and hangs up, has a potential to harm in some small way.

Does there need to be a code of ethics for auto mechanics? Does there need to be a code of ethics for telephone operators? I don't think so. We can get along quite nicely with one big code of ethics for everybody: ``Don't f*** anyone over.'' At least that's my code of ethics. It has worked for me no matter what field I am working in. The only thing it requires is a little bit of thought, that that is what is lacking.

Don't start thinking this is a new problem, either. People have been evil and opportunistic since the beginning of time. Just because we have a new advancement in technology, doesn't mean that today is any different than any other point in history. If you think you live in some kind of ``special time'' or ``golden age,'' you're just fooling yourself.

So come on, everybody. Just be nice.

Also, I have a hard time believing that you can teach ethics. That is something that can only be learned by example.

• Chuck

PS: Was this supposed to be some kind of review?

Go Away Katz

This essay on "computer ethics" reminds me of "bioethicists." Bioethicists are typically techno-phobic wet blankets who go out of their way to scare people with obscure horror stories and far-fetched scenarios. The incredible values that biotechnology can bring are often ignored, and instead bioethicists engage in phony posturing about the impending doom of humanity if X new biotech breakthrough isn't controlled.

Katz is doing the exact same thing. His concern for "computer ethics" does not seem to be so much concern for specific problems but a simple desire to pontificate on the evils of computers in general. A few specific issues:

"hacking versus cracking:" I'm not sure what definition of "hacking" he's using, but the standard one on /. is simply clever and/or quick-and-dirty programming. I don't see how that's ever bad.

He mentions the piracy issue and then has nothing of value to say about it. Yes it's a problem. So what?

He trots out the "gap between the rich and poor" argument, which has been standard leftist fare with any new innovation for decades. But the simple fact is that computing for the masses is here. You can get a decent PC for under $1000. You can get a 486 for a couple hundred dollars. And those numbers will continue to drop.

He then proceeds to attack the industry for "abusing" its customers. This is also nonsense. The computer industry has been improving its product faster than any other industry in the history of the universe. So technologically, this is certainly not true. And yes, some companies have lousy tech support. So what? Other companies have pretty good tech support, and if people really want better tech support someone will figure that out and offer it. This is simply an inconvenience, not an industry-wide crisis.

The final "preoblem" he trots out is "incivility." This is just baloney. Apperantly some people have thin skins, and so therefore we need to tone down our discusions to avoid offending anyone. I say if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. There are a lots of moderated forums where you don't have to deal with any "incivil" people.