Two topics this week:

1. Describe four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals.
2. Compare cybersecurity risks in the U.S. and another country.

Ethical issues

Some googling on this prompt turned up an article that I think perfectly encapsulates the ethical issues pertaining to electronic storage of information about individuals. In Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age, Richard O. Mason introduces the acronym PAPA, which he defines as follows:

• Privacy: What information about one’s self or one’s associations must a person reveal to others, under what conditions and with what safeguards? What things can people keep to themselves and not be forced to reveal to others?
• Accuracy: Who is responsible for the authenticity, fidelity and accuracy of information? Similarly, who is to be held accountable for errors in information and how is the injured party to be made whole?
• Property: Who owns information? What are the just and fair prices for its exchange? Who owns the channels, especially the airways, through which information is transmitted? How should access to this scarce resource be allocated?
• Accessibility: What information does a person or an organization have a right or a privilege to obtain, under what conditions and with what safeguards?

Cybersecurity risks: U.S. vs. Germany

For this section, I’m using data compiled by the website Comparitech in an attempt to objectively compare cybersecurity risks between the United States and Germany. The information I’m using is from the filterable table about two-thirds of the way down the page. The overall scores are “percentile” style; that is, the lower the number, the better the score. I chose to compare the U.S and Germany because I’ve lived in both places and why not?

I’m no statistician, so I can’t really speak meaningfully about these numbers. But, here’s my layman’s analysis:

• The “Average Overall Score” is comparable for each: the U.S. is at the 19.69th percentile, while Germany is at the 19.57th percentile.
• Although for each individual category the scores are still relatively comparable, the U.S. tends to score worse. For example, in the category “% of Mobiles Infected with Malware” Germany scores 1.63%, while the U.S. is at 2.89%.
• The U.S. score for “% of SSH-Based Attacks by Originating Country (IoT)” is almost triple that of Germany’s, with 14.75% and 4.67%, respectively.
• Germany has a worse score than the U.S. for “% Share of Countries Targeted by Malicious Mailings (Yearly)”