Brandon Majors
5/12/2015
CIT 262
Final Reflection Essay From this course I have learned significantly better how to analyze situations with an ethical point of view. The first discussions and classes taught me what the definitions of Act Utilitarianism, Rule Utilitarianism and Kantianism were all about. Then I learned how to apply them to IT issues. Also having the guest in the class showed me how to find more reliable peer reviewed sources. The cases we studied in the second class showed how to apply these ethical theories to each situation. There are many ethical challenges from the technology forefront to address. In my opinion one of the greatest challenges is the privacy and security issues. Studying Edward Snowden in the class gave me some perspective on these issues I have never seen or dealt with before. At one point in my life I had considered joining the military but my feelings towards our government held me back, this knowledge of Snowden and the information he released only supported that feeling. The challenge of how ethical is to spy on our countries citizens to protect our security was my favorite and most interesting topic in the course in my opinion. This course also put the students in situations where evaluating a case from an ethical point of view, where not everyone always agreed. It was interesting and informational to see how others evaluate a topic ethically compared to how I would evaluate the topic. The game where each group had a boss and employees and had to decide who got fired, I was the one to get fired in my group for not agreeing with the majority of how the group should handle the situation ethically, so overall it was a very good learning experience. Also using other student’s responses to group discussion in our position papers was a good way to see others point of view and then apply it to your own research and opinion. Other countries are currently looking at the U.S. on how to solve ethical issues in the technology world. In my final project, our topic was drone usage, which is highly debated in an ethical sense, the U.S. is the primary user of drones and many other countries are looking at us to see how far we take drone usage and what will ultimately be socially acceptable usage of drones. These action effect other communities. The topic of surveillance and privacy is something that is already have different cultural effects, while the U.S. is being second guessed for how much it spy’s on its own citizens, The U.K. is reportedly worse in this area and does more spying that even the U.S. The social responsibility of software developers is an ethical issue we have addressed many times in the course. Is it the developer’s responsibility when a piece of software is malfunction and causing greater issues with its user base? There needs to be a code of