The following questions are intended as a guide to the ethical/social/legal issues associated with the field of computing. The goal is not merely to answer these questions. You should also consider why you answered as you did and whether your justifications are consistent from one question to the next.

1. In the United States, DNA records of all federal prisoners are now stored in a database for use in criminal investigations. Would it be ethical to release this information for other purposes—for example, for medical research? If so, for what purposes? If not, why not? What are the pros and cons in each case?

2. To what extent should a university be allowed to release information about its students? What about their names and addresses? What about grade distributions without identifying the students? Is your answer consistent with your answer to Question 1?

3. What restrictions are appropriate regarding the construction of databases about individuals? What information does a government have a right to hold regarding its citizens? What information does an insurance company have a right to hold regarding its clients? What information does a company have a right to hold regarding its employees? Should controls in these settings be implemented and, if so, how?

4. Is it proper for a credit card company to sell the purchasing patterns of its clients to marketing firms? Is it acceptable for a sports car mail order business to sell its mailing list to a sports car magazine? Is it acceptable for the Internal Revenue Service in the United States to sell the names and addresses of those taxpayers with significant capital gains to stockbrokers? If you cannot answer with an unqualified yes or no, what would you propose as an acceptable policy?

5. To what extent is the designer of a database responsible for how the information in that database is used?

6. Suppose a database mistakenly allows unapproved access to information in the database. If that information is obtained and used adversely, to what degree do the database designers share responsibility for the misuse of the information? Does your answer depend on the amount of effort required by the perpetrator to discover the flaw in the database design and obtain the unauthorized information?

7. The prevalence of data mining raises numerous issues of ethics and privacy. Is your privacy infringed if data mining reveals certain characteristics about the overall population of your community? Does the use of data mining promote good business practice or bigotry? To what extent is it proper to force citizens to participate in a census, knowing that more information will be extracted from the data than is explicitly requested by the individual questionnaires? Does data mining give marketing firms an unfair advantage over unsuspecting audiences? To what extent is profiling good or bad?

8. To what extent should a person or corporation be allowed to collect and hold information about individuals? What if the information collected is already publicly available although scattered among several sources? To what extent should a person or company be expected to protect such information?

9. Many libraries offer a reference service so that patrons can enlist the assistance of a librarian when searching for information. Will the existence of the Internet and database technology render this service obsolete? If so, would that be a step forward or backward? If not, why not? How will the existence of the Internet and database technology affect the existence of libraries themselves?

10. To what extent are you exposed to the possibility of identity theft? What steps can you take to minimize that exposure? How could you be damaged if you were the victim of identity theft? Should you be liable when identity theft occurs?