Ethics Reader- cyberethics ch36

We value privacy as well as security because they represent moral values which can be defended using ethical arguments. This paper suggests that the moral bases of privacy and security render them open to misuse for the promotion of particular interests and ideologies. In order to support this argument, the paper discusses the ethical underpinnings of privacy and security. It will then introduce the critical approach to information systems research and explain the role of ideology in critical research. Based on this understanding of the centrality of ideology, the paper will discuss the methodology of critical discourse analysis which allows the identification of instances of ideology. This will then lead to the discussion of an ideology critique based on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which will be applied to the websites of Microsoft Vista and Trustworthy Computing. The results of this discourse analysis support the contention that privacy and security can be used for ideological purposes.