IGNITE TALK ABSTRACT

This presentation considers the Code of Conduct adopted by Association for Computing Machinery, and of raises a number of ethical questions related to the fields of IT and software development. We will discuss real-world cases of software producers facing ethical dilemmas, and how these dilemmas can be approached. The topics include considerations of privacy and information sharing, failing to deliver a service, security vulnerabilities and bugs, and building software that encourages evil behavior.

IT professionals wield a lot of power in today’s society. The ways technology influences society can be overt and subtle, immediate and long-lasting, bring out the best and the worst in people at large. We all need to be better informed to make ethical and moral choices in our work.