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Ethical issues in software
We define ethical issues in software to be:
"A matter that is in dispute between two or more parties" because of misalignments in "the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group" about "something used or associated with and usually contrasted with hardware".
Ethics is different from morals in that it is the accumulation of a specific set of moral principles of a person or a group of people.
When people ethically take issue with an aspect of software, we speak of ethical concerns in software.
Software is manifold and ubiquitous. Despite our current focus on apps on mobile app stores, we point at the fact that most apps are not restricted to the user's mobile phone. Many operations require servers to take the computational load, such as ChatGPT, making the phone an interface to a much larger piece of hardware. Furthermore, the execution of an app relies on many dependencies, starting from the operating system. Some issues therefore do not only relate to how specific features are implemented, but also to the overarching design of a system and how certain systems interact with each other. We consider both software-internal and software-external issues.
Accountability
False information
Identity theft
Sustainability
Accessibility
Content theft
Cyberbullying
Past work shows that concerns about ethics in software are not always isolated. One issue may relate to another at various levels of granularity. The figure above shows how a Dutch cohort of diverse participants related types and subtypes of EIS to another. You can find definitions, explanations and examples of the types (and subtypes) on their respective pages on the left in the sidebar.
