One role of government is to establish standards for safety and to create laws to enforce these standards. But engineering is often at the frontier of scientific development, and sometimes the practicing engineer finds gray areas where appropriate ethical standards and behaviours have not yet been formalized, and laws do not exist or may not been interpreted to address the issues that the engineer faces. Examples where the law is still fuzzy are in the areas of computer privacy , security , and ethical behavior . We will discuss problems related to computer privacy, security and the associated issues of ethical behavior in computer environments. Specifically we want to discuss what you can do to prevent problems.
Privacy refers to the information on a computer as it relates to individuals and businesses.
Seeing private, protected and copyrighted electronic information is a part of working with computers. Knowing how to ethically handle this information is what is important. Computer security means protecting a system from those who choose to act unethically in a computer environment. Security is a never ending process that requires support from management, system administrators, and users. A good password is your best defense against a security breach.