Ethics in Information Technology
You lead a group of five mobile software engineers involved in the development of a new mobile cloud service for providing voice over internet protocol (VOIP) that enables call to be made over WiFi but better than Microsoft’s Skype VOIP product. Your manager tells you that because of a company-wide layoff, you will need to give notice to one member of your team. From your interactions with team members, you can easily identify the two members who are least productive, but you are not sure which of them you should lay off. You know that the company keeps track of all Internet traffic to each person’s computer, although you have never shared this information with you team. You could use this information to determine how much time, if any, these two employees are spending surfing the Web.
What might be some of the implications by accessing these records? What might be the key ethical and/or moral issues, from your perspective, with using these records to make a managerial decision? How does this play into what we learned in this course about monitoring and surveillance of employees?
