As we grow and live our lives day to day, we understand what is right and wrong. We apply good and bad into what we think, how we live, and what we believe in. Through technology and software engineering we have to understand that ethics is applied there too. Just like how man creates a new technology like the car or the gun, it can be used for good or evil. Everything can be misused and destructive if the mentality is there. Ethics in software engineering is to understand the limits of what is good and bad, and minimizing the risk of abuse in your software.
Harassment is a big issue in real life and on the internet. Reading through the case study on harassment helped me think deeply on how the evolution of harassment and cunningness of bad people has exponentially increased over the years. In the swatting article, teenager uses technology to dox, swat, and effectively ruin peoples lives scarring them mentally and even physically hurting them. Psychopathic tendencies and bullying and harassment can be easily carried out through one’s home with a high chance of not being found through the use of technology. Things like VPNs, VOIPs (Skype, Discord, etc.), and simple phone calls to the internet service provider all can be used to ruin someone’s life. These technologies were meant as services for making your internet private, communicating with friends, or a way of accessing support for a technology. The fact that they can be exploited if used in tandem is not ok for the victims and people of the world. I believe when people created this technology, security may not have been their first priority. After thousands maybe millions of cases of swatting, doxing, or DDoSing over the past few years we should understand that security on the internet should be reinforced, and the values and ethics of using the internet should be taught to people of the world. Young people may understand that they shouldn’t harass people in real life. It definitely is not ok to come up to girls and ask for nude photos or threathen to kill their family and ruin their lives, but now that people can hide behind the computer screen and be anonymous means that these feelings can easily come out and enable harassment.
As we move further into the new age, I feel that as a whole, society should better raise their children to be ethical users of the internet. One of the ACM Code of Ethics said that we should steward software to be used for the good of humanity, and while there are many good role models for internet use, there are many bad influences, and we as a people should always try to mitigate and teach new users of the internet to use it ethically and help create software that could be more secure.