ethics are very important not only in IT industry, but in all the industries, because prevention is better than cure.
law can be used to punish the culprit after the crime.
but ethics can stop a person to commit the crime.
if consider about law, how many laws/rules are required?
how many improvements are required in laws/rules?
some times law is helpless in absence of evidence against the culprit.in this case how to achieve justice?
there are numerous questions.
if ethical values are high, it makes life simpler.
hence there is a pressing need of ethical values.
In IT industry ethics are.
1. To maintain confidentiality:
since in IT industry there are several easy ways to disclose/s†éál the one's confidential
information , hence ethics play important role.
only ethics can turn a häçker(problem creator) into a ethical häçker(makes aware about security threats).
2.be a trust worthy IT professional.
consider the scenario where company stores it's data on cloud, and the cloud is managed by some other party.
3.Educate people about ethics :
In case of data corruption,one can punish the culprit, but some times it becomes impossible to recover the data.
so there is a need to think that what is the objective?
to punish the culprit or to protect the data?
obviously data protection will get higher priority?
hence after the proper security arrangements, there is a need to educate people about ethics.
4.Think about society:
the goal of every business is to earn money,but there is a need to think that what is the effect of business operations on society.
it is a time to think about e waste which contributes in pollution.
5.do not misuse access rights:
there are two types of access control, DAC(Discretionary access control) and MAC(mandatory access control)
in DAC, owner decides the access rights.
take the example of database/Network administrator:
if administrators are not honest,there is a chance of data/information
leakage.