HW20: Chapter 20


20.10. You work for a software company that has developed a system that provides information about consumers and that is used within a SoS by a number of other retail businesses. They pay you for the services used. Discuss the ethics of changing the system interfaces without notice to coerce users into paying higher charges. Consider this question from the point of view of the company’s employees, customers, and shareholders.

Changing the interfaces of the system without notice to coerce customers to pay more for the service is clearly unethical as, if it wasn’t unethical, then it wouldn’t have to be done without notice in the first place. The ACM code of ethics states that software engineers should be honest and trustworthy and to “provide full disclosure of all pertinent system capabilities, limitations, and potential problems to the appropriate parties.”

Customers would most likely be angry with the service provider and choose to change providers. If changing providers is not a possibility, then the company might pass on the extra cost to their own customers or impact their own employees by reducing benefits to cover the new cost of the service.

The company’s employees would unfortunately be stuck with the decision of whether or not to implement the changes. It would be unethical to secretly charge their customers more money for their software so they have a duty to report the person(s) responsible for directing the change to the software.

Shareholders may or may not have knowledge of software engineering practices however they should be capable of determining whether a course of action is ethical or not. They shouldn’t cause harm to their customers to their customers in any fashion, financially or otherwise.

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