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

Let me start off by saying this course has been quite the eye opener, so to speak. I have gained a lot of knowledge from this course in ways that I was not expecting. Prior to this course, I would say my knowledge in Philosophy or Ethics was at a bare minimum. I never cared to investigate the subjects and honestly, couldn’t even tell you what it encompassed before the start of this course.

After the start of this course I realized what I have been missing out on. Not only was this course very insightful, but it was also a little inspiring in its own way. I feel extremely motivated to continue furthering my knowledge of the ethical subject area. I have found myself wondering what kind of ethical guidelines my friends go by. It has been a very interesting topic to learn and if my degree permits it, I will be taking some more Ethics course during my Masters.

This course has also helped me realize where I fall in this ethical sphere. From what I can tell I tend to fall more towards an Ethics of Care approach when it comes to hard situations in life. I have realized this because in any situation I want to hurt the least amount of people and I care about the relationships that we have. Furthering relationships with others are a major drive in my life. This is something that I would not have been able to understand without the guidance of this course. This is honestly, the best take way for me from this course. Learning more about myself is always a fantastic thing.

Another thing that I have realized in this course is that the world is not all a field of daisies. There was a lot of stuff in this course that made me realize how grim the world can be. In this course we read about privacy, in particular privacy in the digital world. As the world is evolving, we see that it is harder and harder to opt out of these services that strip us of these liberties of digital privacy. A great example is Facebook and there extremely hard to navigate security tabs in combination with their shadow profiles. There are security practices that we can take to help with this. However, companies make it extremely difficult for end users to achieve this because they want to ensure that they can use the data to their own good. The deeper we delve into this world the worse it is going to get.

My thoughts on this before the start of the course was “you have to pay to play”. My thoughts on this now are that we need to end these practices immediately. It is unfair to the world that these companies are taking this data from us and making it to where it is almost impossible to opt out of it. The sad part is that some of the services are crucial to survive in this modern-day society. An example of this would be the data being sold to the credit score companies. Without a credit score how are you going to get a loan? How are you going to get a car?

A great takeaway that I have gotten from learning about this is that people in the digital field can make a change to this if they are more aware of what they are doing. Being a computer software engineer is a very crucial job that not every person can do. If coders took a more ethical care approach instead of sticking to a Deontological approach, we would see a lot more software being released with a more user-friendly interface. Another solution to this would be for the US government to release a law like the E.U. stating that people can opt out at any time from anything digitally. This again, would align with a more Ethics of Care approach.

The last major perspective that I gained from this course is the fact that you can’t look at everything through your own eyes. Because I tend to lean more towards an Ethics of Care, you would be able to see this bias within my solutions suggested in my papers. But this course has taught me how to open that perspective and see things through the eyes of others. It was very hard at first but eventually I was able to wrap my head around it.

I found it extremely hard to write these ethical analyses through a viewpoint that was different from my own. It was especially difficult to do when I was writing about controversial topics, like war. Writing a paper about how war is good because a Deontological approach says that doing your job is good, was very hard to get down on paper. But in doing so I feel more seasoned in these ethical areas than I would be If I just wrote all my papers on the Ethics of Care. My knowledge on all these ethical models have deepened and my thoughts on them have changed. I was looking at some of these models and how I thought that “there is no way these can be applied in modern situations”. But I was wrong. There are many times that Contractarianism, Deontology, Ethics of Care, and Utilitarianism can be applied even if I don’t believe in some of their viewpoints.

My takeaway from this is to not shut yourself out because you think a certain way about things. Sure, the world isn’t a field of daisies, but sometimes you need to look at the world through a different lens. You could do this for your own gain or to solve a controversial issue you are running into at the workplace. It never hurts to consider a different solution, or what someone else might be thinking.

 

To view my Case Analysis’s please use the following buttons: