SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ETHICS IN A DIGITAL WORLD.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ETHICS IN A DIGITAL WORLD.

In this modern world almost everything that has to do with us is about internet. There’s a lot of activities that we can do with it, socialize, entertainment, finding information, looking for inspiration and many more. But there is a consequence to this; if the security of the system not secure enough, hackers may easily break to our personal information. This is what we called the dual-use dilemma. There is always pros and cons to it. We can take Google maps for example, it could be a lot of help for us to find a map for a place or destination that we are not familiar to, but the cons of the application is, it also looked as invasion of privacy, people can easily locate where our house is when they got the address. Software engineer faces three key challenges to designing system for the digital world, it’s called the three ethical challenges. The first challenge is right to privacy versus the need to protect vulnerable users. Freedom of choice versus protection from harm and context dependent. These challenges cannot be faced by software engineer alone, they need help from the law-makers, and social scientist. Not to be forgotten there is five key challenge that software engineers must face over the next 5 to 10 years, it is how to understand ethics requirement from the different stake holder, to conduct tradeoff analysis involving ethics considerations when making architectural and design choices, how to validate and test that the system whether it meets the ethical considerations and associated design tradeoff, to incorporate ethics awareness practice in existing software engineering methodologies and processes, and to train the software engineer in ethic software design.