Importance of Ethics
23 Apr 2020
What are “ethics” in software engineering?
To me, I think “ethics” in the context of software engineering means to respect and follow a certain set of “hidden” rules and guidelines whenever you are involved with coding. Ethics must exist when people are involved in software engineering because a single person’s codes can affect the daily lives of many users. It would be scary for everyone if there were no ethics followed by all software engineers since you could never trust anything that they would make because they could potentially be deceitful or cause harm to you or others. To me, ethics in software engineering might also involve the standards you hold when software engineering. Although some software engineers hold some of the same ethical principals, there might be some different standards one holds compared to another, or some might value a standard higher than others. For example, some might hold security at the highest of priorities, while some might see security as important, but not as much as the quality of their product.
The Facebook scandal
A lot of big companies of social networks will respect most ethics of coding to gain the trust of their users and be respected as a good company. Facebook is a social media platform where users can chat with others, play games, and post things to the public. Facebook has one of the highest user counts on social media which means that there is a lot of user data stored by Facebook for every single user on their website. In 2018, Facebook had a scandal in which the ethics of coding were severely breached and the information of millions of users was sold and given to others without permission. Facebook had violated the ethics of coding by violating, for example, two important ethics which is to respect privacy and to avoid harm. This has caused harm to the millions of users on the website and did not respect their privacy at all since they sold their information to organizations and the public. Facebook is an integrated part of the infrastructure of society when it had its many users, which is why they had to recognize this and take care of the systems that were part of it. They didn’t follow this ethic since they did not follow appropriate standards of care for the information and power they had.
My opinion about ethics
Ethics is very important to everyday life since it greatly factors into how we operate in our daily lives. This should be the same for software engineering since, in today’s modern times, the software is integrated to mostly everything, and when ethics are not followed by software engineers, terrible things may happen and many lives will be affected and changed. I think every software engineer should take some sort of ethics test because it is crazy to think about how much data and power one software engineer can hold. Just as a bank is responsible for protecting your money and life savings from others, software engineers for social media are responsible for protecting your data and privacy. Standards must exist or else we might not ever have the luxury of using software since everything may not be safe. I would personally not want to live a life with no coding ethics since I use software daily, and my life would be greatly affected if something were to happen.