Cybersecurity Ethics

This course examines ethical issues relevant to ethics for cybersecurity professionals, including privacy, professional code of conduct, practical conflicts between engineering ethics and business practices, individual and corporate social responsibility, ethical hacking, information warfare, and cyberwarfare. Students will gain a broad understanding of central issues in cyberethics and the ways that fundamental ethical theories relate to these core issues.

Course Material

The first topic that I engaged with in this course that I would like to talk about is Privacy. Privacy has always been a big deal for me and before this course started, I was more pro privacy than I am now. Through the readings and through the case analysis on privacy I have become more lenient on privacy with an understanding that as a society we will have to give up some of our privacy to gain security. I understand that I am not that important of a person and I am willing to give up some of my privacy if it keeps me in my loved ones safe. By some privacy I mean that I’m willing for law enforcement to be able to monitor my online activity as well as all other online activities. If you are worried about the police monitoring your online activities then you are doing something illegal. My takeaway from privacy that I want to set for my future self and be guided by is that this is the 21st century privacy is a thing of the past while there are still certain rights that we should have and certain privacy that we should have we as a society need to come together and give up us very small percentage of our privacy for our safety. In our safety is much more paramount than our privacy will ever be. The next topic that I would like to discuss is big data. Big data is one of the most terrifying subjects that I read and learned more about in this course. I came into this course with a very limited understanding of big data and data mining. While people have explained to me how bad it is I never was really able to fully grasp the concept of big data, however, through the module 7 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower video I have never been more terrified of big data and information warfare. What can be done without you even knowing about it and what private information is being pulled out from under your feet without you even knowing about it is very scary. The biggest takeaway that I want my future self to remember and be guided by is how scary big data is and how I need to be more focused and conscious on voting for people that can actually make a change and stop these big companies from collecting all of this data on us and using it against us. The last topic that I wanted to discuss was EINSTIEN. While the other two topics were topics that worried me and scared me Einstein was a topic that absolutely intrigued me in something that I wanted to learn more about. Just the idea of a machine being capable of sorting through that much information and flagging the bad for human review is absolutely fascinating to me and there’s something that I will be doing a lot more research on. When the EINSTIEN reading started that was a reading that I could not put down and I wanted to learn everything about. My takeaway that I want my future self to remember and be guided by when it comes to EINSTIEN is that I should try to be more curious and ask more questions. By that I mean learn more about the topics that I already know because I’m only scratching the surface of what is possible to learn in these topics. Another takeaway is that I want to do a lot more research into EINSTIEN and learn everything that I can about it.