Even when the culprit is caught, convictions are hard to secure and penalties have usually been extremely light considering the staggering amounts of money or damage involved. Another large area of concern in computer ethics is that of privacy. There are thousands of data banks in business, government, health care and education, containing all kinds of information on millions of Americans. Surely, a secretary using a computer terminal should not be able to gain information on her boss' health problems, financial status, promotion prospects. Some answers to questions such as these seem obvious, but others are complicated and debatable.
Much work needs to be done in considering the issues.
In the mid 1960's, a major public uproar resulted from a proposal before Congress to create a central bank of information on all Americans. The National Data Center, as it was to be called, would assign an identifying number to each American and then establish a dossier of information from the IRS, Census Bureau, National Center for Health Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Education and scores of other government data banks. Even if government data banks were ignored, however, business and industry taken as a whole have sufficient data on most Americans to enable an information thief to compile very full dossiers on his victims. Imagine that an unscrupulous person gains access to the files of doctors, psychiatrists, banks, credit bureaus, personnel offices, lawyers, accountants, insurance companies and so on. The result could be powerful tools for harassment, blackmail, repression, political control, to name but a few possibilities.