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Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems 159

FIGURE 4.2 NONOBVIOUS RELATIONSHIP AWARENESS (NORA)

NORA technology can take information about people from disparate sources and find obscure,
nonobvious relationships. It might discover, for example, that an applicant for a job at a casino shares
a telephone number with a known criminal and issue an alert to the hiring manager.

Finally, advances in networking, including the Internet, promise to greatly
reduce the costs of moving and accessing large quantities of data and open the
possibility of mining large pools of data remotely using small desktop machines,
permitting an invasion of privacy on a scale and with a precision heretofore
unimaginable.

4.2 ETHICS IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY

Ethics is a concern of humans who have freedom of choice. Ethics is about
individual choice: When faced with alternative courses of action, what is the
correct moral choice? What are the main features of ethical choice?

BASIC CONCEPTS: RESPONSIBILITY, ACCOUNTABILITY,
AND LIABILITY

Ethical choices are decisions made by individuals who are responsible for the
consequences of their actions. Responsibility is a key element of ethical action.
Responsibility means that you accept the potential costs, duties, and obligations for

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