Internet Ethics

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2001), "Internet Ethics", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 5, pp. 255-255. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.5.255.1

Changes in electronic information and telecommunications have led to changes in legal and ethical thinking. This is reflected in the growing literature on information law and ethics. It is a wide field, some of it (like intellectual property law, computer and software law, professional ethics) documented better than others. Often debates on ethics take different directions from those on law, paradoxical though it may sound, so it is good to have a book on Internet ethics which so surely covers both law and ethics, and at the same time addresses such a wide but coherent range of information developments and applications. Langford comes highly recommended with good books on computer ethics (he lectures at the University of Kent), and he has assembled a strong team of contributors, including Tavani and Mawhood, Spinello and van den Hoven. Between them they pick out the key issues in Internet ethics and discuss them in thoughtful and topical ways. Discussion ranges from philosophy to practicalities of network security, from overarching social issues like privacy and globalisation to the specifics of e‐mail management and encryption. An international perspective is provided, with responses from around the world to the various chapters, and a helpful and original bibliography completes the work.

Privacy lies at the heart of Internet ethics, and it has legal and ethical dimensions. Data protection proves the point. Privacy existed before the Internet, but the contributors move the debate on in order to examine information privacy and data mining, cookies and search engines, digital signatures and anonymity tools and trustmarks. The social principles mix with the hard stuff about security software (like TRUSTe). The book is strong on Internet law – copyright and patents, trademarks and defamation – but this is placed side‐by‐side with Internet ethics – the nature of wrong‐doing, how we define wrong‐doing (for example, is it based on duty or consequences, pragmatism or professional responsibility?). Where spamming and infringement, secondary copyright infringement and confidentiality are concerned, these are both legal and ethical issues for information professionals. There are further issues when information is created, stored and disseminated automatically. Professional codes of conduct go some of the way, and it is worth asking whether people pay attention to them and why they exist – this book does that (though no reference is made directly to library professionals’ codes). Wider, the book does justice to the larger debate about democracy and freedom and the Internet. It also has a useful introductory chapter on the development of the Internet, above average for such chapters. So, an excellent, useful, topical, and highly competent work worth buying for the shelves in any library serving under‐ and post‐graduate study, the legal practice, the personal collection of any computer, information, and legal professional. Well worth the money.