Communication Technologies Shape New Moral Questions
Jan 28th, 2008 • Posted in: NewsAre social networking sites driving suicides in Wales? Do Google searches about prospective employees violate their privacy? Can battlefield ethics be taught via holographic projection?
VARIOUS DATELINES
A number of stories from the frontier of technological ethics garnered headlines last week. Among them:
- U.K. officials are scrambling to address one of most troubling aspects of the information age: websites devoted to suicide. The Times of London reports that law enforcement officials are beginning a sweeping review of sites that discuss taking one’s own life and are looking at new laws designed to curb the dissemination of information about suicide. Suicide sites most recently appeared on the public’s radar screen after a series of deaths in South Wales that some suspect are linked to a social networking site, reports trade journal InformationWeek.
- The Toronto Globe & Mail last week profiled one of the troubling ethical frontiers confronting job seekers and human-resource professionals: the fact that information lives forever online and is instantly accessible to potential employers. Reporter Chad Saphieha writes: “Employers are increasingly turning to online searches or social networking sites to discover information about potential employees. According to research carried out by Connecticut-based human resources agency ExecuNet, 77 percent of executive recruiters use search engines to help screen candidates. Meanwhile, employment website CareerBuilder reports that in a survey of more than a thousand hiring managers, one in four said they use search engines to help filter applicants. The big problem, Saphieha notes, is that hirers can discover information online that legally they cannot ask about in interviews, such as religion, marital status, and race. In a complex and expensive counteroffensive, some firms will create pages of positive information about job candidates designed to be discovered by search engine formulas and appear higher in the list of results than the negative information.
- The U.S. Marine Corps is using cutting-edge holographic technology to teach battlefield ethics at a state-of-the-art training center at Camp Pendleton in southern California. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the facility, which resembles a giant movie set recreating a city block in Iraq, will use laser technology to project images of troops and civilians in lifelike battlefield scenarios, putting Marines through the process of making split-second battle decisions involving morals and laws. According to the Union-Tribune, the establishment of the training facility comes after a survey on battlefield ethics, conducted about a year ago, found that only 40 percent of Marines would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.
Sources: Times of London, Jan. 26 — InformationWeek, Jan. 26 — Globe & Mail, Jan. 26 — San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 16.
For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Dec. 17, 2007 — Related Newsline Commentary, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 26, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 5, 2007.
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