"With great power comes great responsibility"-Uncle Ben from Spiderman.

The discussion about ethics in IT is very relevant these days. Whether it's using someone else's images on your website, reporting information on an international news website or posting perceivably defamatory information on a blog.

Dr. Mohan was relating an interesting experience he had with a situation that occured in the department a few years ago. The main point that I pulled out of the discussion was that the students email was being read. Now, this post is not one that will call fire and brimstone 'pon those involved. Instead i will talk a bit about the rational behind the reading of the emails by the authorities. They basically said that since the computers and network belong to the university they were justified in reading the emails. This is interesting because it now make me less confident in the system her at my wonderful univerisity HOWEVER, i am not eternally disenfranchised. I disagree with the fact that they read the emails but I guess if they want to play it that way, then fine. We will just use out hotmail.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com, localISP.com and everywhere_else_but_UWI.com email accounts. No scene!

Does this mean that our email is now 'safe' from being read? The answer...an emphatic NO! Of course it isn't. The email systems and all computer systems for that matter are built with certain admin controls for maintainance purposes I suppose. The way in which your information is handled however is the key. The question is how responsible are these with this sort of power actually being? I am sure that all the alternative email servers I mentioned before can read your emails as well. I absolutely positive they can do such a thing. It boils down to if they will rummage through my emails to see what I've written. You have to ask yourself, do they care about what's in my email? What was the movitation for the email reading in Dr. Mohan's case? There was a purpose for it. It was misguided, but there was a purpose for it.

Another example of this is Cayman Island Bank Accounts. These accounts are private. The numbers are only known by the account holder and the bank. Now, these accounts are sometimes used for illegal reasons but that is not the purpose of it. My point is this. The bank has the information on these people but they cannot reveal this information just like that because it goes against their code of ethics.

So what's the final verdict? Just because you have the ability to do something (capability) does it mean that you absolutely should? (responsibility) No, you shouldn't. You should at least tell people that they are being monitored so that they would chose what information they wouldn't mind being seen.