Consider the scenario in which a group of your fellow students approach you to see whether you are interested in participating in a project that is intended to be a commercial venture. The group has come up with a novel approach to obtaining large number of e-mail addresses. This requires the development of some software, and once this is used, it will be possible to develop a very extensive e-mail address list.
Subsequently, this information is to be sold to companies involved in spam advertising. You voice some initial reservations based upon your concern that this may not be entirely legal/ethical. However, you are assured that the software will only be used to obtain e-mail addresses for people who are normally based overseas – specifically in third world countries. Since the team is to be based in the UK and the software is going to be used to locate e-mail addresses that are normally based outside the UK, you are assured that you will be breaking no UK law.
How would you proceed?
I will not participate to the development of the project because it is unethical even if it is considered legal. Obtaining and locating email addresses without the permission of the owner is already unethical. Gathering a large number of e-mail addresses and selling them to the companies that are drawn in spam advertising is also unethical. These things may violate the privacy rights of end users and may possibly harm their computers by opening/running a malicious file. Spam also disturbs people by not soliciting messages sent to any email address indiscriminately to form a large-sized message. In instant messaging, many IM (Instant Messaging) systems offer a directory of users. These information may be gathered and used by the advertisers to send unsolicited messages, which may possibly contain commercial scam-ware, viruses and links for the purpose of click fraud.
Do you consider that this is a legal/ethical undertaking?
Yes, because it does not break any UK law since it’s not part of the country’s jurisdiction. It is not considered ethical because it is obtaining and locating email addresses without the permission of the owner. Also, you are barging to individual’s internet privacy by sending messages or large size of messages without the approval of the owner.
In that case that you are not entirely happy with the possible ethical aspects of this venture (but you are satisfied that you will not be breaking UK law), would you still be willing to participate if the level of remuneration is sufficient? At what point would personal remuneration override any ethical reservations that you may have?
It is an opportunity to have a part-time job. Practicing ethical actions starts from us so if you start your first project unethically, all next the project you will do might start unethically also because you think that there is nothing wrong with it as long as it is legal. I will disregard this type of project because it does not do any help instead it creates more problems.
Let us suppose that you do become involved in this undertaking but that you subsequently find that the software that you helped to develop is not only being used to locate e-mail addresses that are normally based outside the UK, but in addition e-mail addresses within the UK, and these are being sold on to companies who specialize in spam advertising? Does this compromise your legal position?
In that case, my legal position is compromised because according to what I read, there is a whole web of UK and EU data protection laws and regulations which apply to online privacy and the collection of data and use of personal data via website. This laws and regulations comprise the Privacy Regulations or The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. The main feature of internet privacy compliance when collecting personal information online is to acquire an adequate level of approval from the person providing the data but if you fail to do this or you do not get the enough level of consent you can be sued by data subjects or subject to regulatory enforcement action.
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