Ethical Issues About Sony's Data Breach

INTRODUCTION

With the rapid developing of technology and growing of knowledge, the society has entered into the age of information. Internet has become an impartible part of modern life, acting as a global, web-based platform, which facilitates the connection, communication, collaboration and the provision of information worldwide. Undoubtedly, people benefit a lot from the information technologies, but in the mean time, it is this technology that makes it easier for criminals to engage in certain illegal or unethical practices anywhere in the world. Additionally, people and organizations are currently facing more and more ethical dilemma regarding to IT problems. In this report, P-A-P-A model is first introduced to categorized the general ethical issues of the information age; then analysis of implication of P-A-P-A model relating to the case of Sony’s PlayStation Network outage will be given; last but not the least, some personal opinion towards this issues will be addressed.

P-A-P-A MODEL

Richard O. Mason first put forward “Four Ethical Issues of Information Age” in 1986. The acronym of PAPA stands for Privacy, Accuracy, Property and Accessibility.

Privacy- what personal information should be divulged to another person and under what kind of circumstance? What things people need to keep by themselves? In another word, privacy is the right of retaining information without disclosure. Proper security policy must be in place to guard against any unauthorized access to that information.

Accuracy- a simple mistake can cause serious impact especially in today’s society where the pervasive use of information makes us seem more vulnerable. Mason argued that a special burden has been imposed on the accuracy of information. Accurate information must be of completeness, relevance and no error, therefore it is important to ensure the adopted system is up to date and all components of the system work together to generate accurate data output.

Property- Mason regarded the most complicated problem that we face nowadays is about the intellectual property rights, as significant ethical and economic elements are involved with it. A case in point is the illegal downloading of software, music and movies. The authors of the media are losing both money and credits for their creative activities at the same time. Such violation of property right is also known as piracy. Legal measures such as copyright laws and users licensing agreement are taken for