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1. Personal Story
Five years ago, in 2011, I was was dating a girl who was around my age. She had a younger sister and brother, whom I got on well with. As time progressed however, their mother eventually bought a laptop for their family to all share. For a while, things were going well with the laptop; it was functioning as it was supposed too, my girlfriend’s younger siblings would seldom argue over use of the laptop and in the evenings we generally got to have it to ourselves.
But one day I went to run a scan with the anti-virus software that I’d installed on the laptop for my girlfriend’s family. It was something I would do regularly as my girlfriend’s family, knowing how tech-savvy I was (and still am), trusted me to keep the laptop functioning properly. The scan was progressing normally, until suddenly it alerted me to a threat that had been detected. I was immediately surprised and went to check the details, only to find that a piece of spyware had somehow managed to install itself on it. The anti-virus easily quarantined and dealt to the spyware and thought little more of it for the rest of the day.
However, only a few days later, I went over to my girlfriend’s house, jumped on the laptop, ran a scan and found that apparently another copy of the spyware had installed itself on the laptop again. I immediately suspected that it had somehow made a backdoor for itself on the laptop and, after hours of searching for this back door, and after consulting my girlfriend and her parents and finding that they had their files backed up, I decided to take the safe option and reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install of Windows 7.
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I was flabberghasted however when just a few days after this, I went to run yet another scan on the laptop and found, yep you guessed it, the same piece of spyware on the laptop. I didn’t know what to make of it, until it hit me. I’d spent so long trying to resolve the issue from within the laptop that I’d overlooked the obvious; the user. This laptop was being regularly used by six different people including myself, and at least two of them were very computer illiterate (being my girlfriend’s siblings, although her parents weren’t much better either in all honesty. Well, actually her mother wasn’t too bad with computers, but I digress).
I wondered if any of them had been doing anything on this laptop that they shouldn’t be, although at first I wasn’t sure how to go about finding this out. I knew that if I asked them about it they’d be unlikely to tell me, either due to being too embarrassed or simply having no clue of what it was they were doing that could be causing this spyware to be able to install itself on here.
I spent quite a decent amount of time actually wondering about the ethics of my decision to resolve this, but eventually I ended up installing some surveillance software on the laptop so that I could keep tabs on my girlfriend and her families activity on the laptop, without informing any of them of this.
Interestingly, I soon found that, after running some trials, my girlfriend’s brother had been going to a particular website that would utilize both Java and Flash to run dinky little games that he obviously enjoyed playing. Unfortunately, the server carrying the website was a host for spyware and would upload spyware to any computer that connected to it and played any of the games.
I now knew what was causing this spyware to repeatedly appear on this laptop; the only challenge I had now was how to confront him and the rest of my girlfriend’s family. I ended up spending a few days mulling over this, but eventually I decided that probably the best thing to do would be to be honest with them, so I decided to tell my girlfriend and her parents what I’d done and explained my reasoning.
Fortunately, they were quite understanding and were pretty much just happy that I’d found out what was causing this spyware issue.
2. What of the IITPs 8 ethical tenets does your story relate to?
I believe that my story relates too the 2nd tenet. This is as follows:
“Integrity – Members shall act in the execution of their profession with integrity, dignity and honour to merit the trust of the community and the profession, and apply honesty, skill, judgement and initiative to contribute positively to the well-being of society;”
If you’d like to read the other 7 tenets, you can find them here: http://iitp.nz/about/ethics
I think my story relates to this tenet because I wasn’t completely honest with my girlfriend and her family and instead was dishonest about my actions, despite any reasoning I could’ve had for doing so.
3. The 8 tenets are not listed in order of importance. If you were to chose the 3 most important tenets what would they be and why?
- Competence – Members shall follow recognised professional practice, and provide services and advice carefully and diligently only within their areas of competence.
- Continuous Development – Members shall develop their knowledge, skills and expertise continuously through their careers, contribute to the collective wisdom of the profession, and actively encourage their associates to do likewise;
- Good Faith – Members shall treat people with dignity, good faith and equality; without discrimination; and have consideration for the values and cultural sensitivities of all groups within the community affected by their work;
I haven’t ranked these 3 tenets in any particular order or importance either, as I believe they are equally important.
My reasoning for choosing the first tenet (Competence) is because I believe it is important to always apply all of your skills and act in a competent manner whenever you’re working on another person’s computer or otherwise helping them with some kind of technology.
My reasoning for choosing the second tenet (Continuous Development) is because I’ve always believed that it’s important, as people, for all of us, not just IT professionals, to always continue developing and on ourselves and trying to improve our skills and character.
Finally, my reasoning for choosing the third tenet (Good Faith) is because I believe it’s important to treat all people equally and not to discriminate. In this PC world we live in now anyway, it won’t get anyone very far, especially if word gets around that you’re discriminating against certain people and subsequently not working on their computer problems or deliberately doing a poor job while working on their problems.
4. What is NMITs relationship with IITP and what are the benefits of this for nmits students?
AS NMIT has a number of IT professionals currently employed, every single one of them would have to follow all 8 of these tenets each and every time they go into work. The benefit for students is that they can place full trust in them, so if they happen to have an issue with their laptop/computer, an issue connecting to one of the NMIT’s wi-fi network’s, they can know with 100% certainty that somehow their problem will be resolved.
Bibliography:
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