PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Ethics Assignment-

Task - Spam Email

Overview - The purpose of this task is to encourage students to explore a variety of ethical theories and apply them to a contemporary ethical issue in an area of social computing.

Assessment Details

Background

Spam is typically viewed as e-mail that is unsolicited, commercial and sent tin bulk to multiple users: Because spam is unsolicited it is also non-consensual, however not all non-consensual email is spam. Miller and Moor (2008) state that according to some estimates as much as 80% of email sent could qualify as spam.

Spam is cheap to send. It doesn't take much computer resources to send huge amounts of emails, and there's no equivalent to postage to cost spammers money. Spammers can even use infected computers - or botnets - to send these emails out, so they don't have to pay for legitimate computing resources of their own. Spam is practically free to send. Because of this, it doesn't matter that the majority of people will never fall for a spam email.

If just one out of every 50,000 people who gets an email falls for it, that may be enough for the spammer to make a profit. There is no one point where spam can be cut off. No organisation controls email. Anyone can operate their own email servers, and many emails are sent to people who aren't in each other's address books. An email server can send as many emails as it wants.

Requirements-

Students are required to undertake an ethical analysis of issues associated with spam email in a professional (business) context. Students will prepare a business style report of approximately 2000 words, which analyses spam email through the lens of each of the FOUR (4) ethical philosophies presented in lectures, and ONE (1) element selected from the Australian Computer Society's (ACS) code of ethics.

When analysing spam email, consider ONE (1) of the following ethical dilemmas:

Who should govern spam email?

What are the perceived benefits to spammers?

What are the issues associated with spam email for organisations?

Another issue to be approved by course lecturer and/or tutor

Select one or 2 key issues

For assistance in report writing techniques, see: http://unilearning.uow.edu.au/report/4b.html

A suggested report structure is as follows.

-title page

-executive summary

-table of contents

-introduction

-ethical analysis of spam email

• utilitarianism
• deontology
• social contract
• character based
• ACS code of ethics

-conclusion

-references

-appendices

2000 words

4 apa reference.