By the end of this lesson, cadets will be able to:
| Source | Sections | Why |
|---|---|---|
| ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct | Preamble and Sections 1–4 (all 28 principles) | The framework you will apply in the discussion. Read the principles and skim the guidance under each. |
| ACM “Using the Code: Case Studies” | Any one or two cases | Optional. Worked examples of applying the Code to real situations, written by the task force that wrote the Code. A good model for your own analysis. |
| Ethics in Computing (NC State) | Browse the case catalog | Optional. A browsable catalog of real computing cases to help you choose an issue to write about. |
Read it once, start to finish. You do not need to memorize the numbers. The goal is to recognize the shape of the Code so that when you read about a real issue, the relevant principles come to mind.
Section 1, General Ethical Principles. The foundation: contribute to society, avoid harm, be honest, be fair, respect others’ work, respect privacy, honor confidentiality. Most everyday cases land here.
Section 2, Professional Responsibilities. What it means to do the work well: quality, competence, knowing the rules, accepting review, evaluating risks and impacts, secure design.
Section 3, Professional Leadership Principles. For those who lead teams or systems: keep the public good central, care for systems that become part of society’s infrastructure.
Section 4, Compliance with the Code. Upholding the Code and treating violations seriously.
You will write your discussion post about a real computing ethics issue. Have one or two candidates ready. The discussion handout lists starting points (algorithmic decisions in criminal justice, automated hiring, large data breaches, location data from fitness apps, smart-city surveillance, dual-use research, and more), or browse the optional case catalogs in the readings.
Open the Ethics Discussion in Blackboard and read what is being asked: one main post and two replies, graded together out of 40 points. Knowing where the points are before you draft makes the whole thing easier.
The systems you will build decide who gets a loan, what a feed shows a teenager, whether a sensor flags the right person, and how a hospital records survive a crash. Computing professionals sit at the controls of technology that touches nearly everyone, often invisibly. That position carries responsibility, and “it compiled and shipped” is not the same as “it was the right thing to build.” The goal today is not to make you feel guilty about technology. It is to give you a shared, professional vocabulary for spotting the ethical stakes in a situation and reasoning about them clearly enough to defend a position.
The Association for Computing Machinery is the largest professional body in computing, and its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (adopted in 2018) is the standard reference for the field. The Code is not a rulebook that decides cases for you. As its own preamble says, it is a basis for ethical decision-making: most real situations touch several principles, and different principles carry different weight depending on the facts. The public good is always the primary consideration.
The Code has four sections, 28 numbered principles in all. Here is the full map for reference. Read the actual text and guidance on the ACM site; this is just the skeleton.
Naming a principle is the easy part and earns almost nothing. The skill the discussion grades, and the skill that matters in practice, is application. For each principle you choose, do four things:
A useful test: if a sentence in your post would read the same no matter which issue you were writing about, it is not application yet. Application is specific to your facts.
The issue. A popular fitness app let users share their workouts and then published a global “heatmap” built from everyone’s aggregated GPS tracks. The data was anonymized and aggregated, so the company saw little risk. But in remote areas where almost the only people exercising were soldiers, the bright lines on the otherwise dark map traced the perimeters, internal roads, and patrol routes of military sites that were not supposed to be on any public map. Analysts spotted it within days.
Principle 1.6, Respect privacy. The company treated “aggregated and anonymized” as equivalent to “safe to publish.” The privacy principle asks more than that: it calls for understanding the forms privacy can take and preventing re-identification. Here, aggregating sparse data in an empty region did not hide individuals or the pattern of their movements; it spotlighted them. Applying 1.6, the company should have evaluated whether the published product could expose sensitive patterns about identifiable groups and places, not just whether individual names were attached.
Principle 1.2, Avoid harm. The exposure was not merely embarrassing; it created a foreseeable physical-security risk to people at those sites. Avoiding harm requires anticipating the consequences of a design choice, including consequences the designers did not intend. A pre-release review asking “who could be hurt if this data were read by an adversary?” would have surfaced the risk. Applying 1.2, the responsible move was to assess and mitigate that harm, for example by excluding sparse or sensitive regions, before publishing rather than after the story broke.
A reasoned position. Publishing the heatmap as designed was an ethical lapse, not because the engineers acted maliciously, but because they reasoned about privacy and harm too narrowly. “No individual is named” is not the same as “no one is exposed,” and “we did not intend harm” is not the same as “we took care to avoid it.” The two principles together point to the same fix: a consequences-and-stakeholders review before release, with the public good, including the safety of people who never opted into being mapped, treated as the primary consideration. Notice that this analysis used exactly two principles, tied each to specific facts, and ended somewhere. That is the shape of a strong main post.
Your assessment for this lesson is a graded discussion in Blackboard, worth 40 points. It has three parts, graded together:
The worked example above is a model for the main post: state the issue, apply two principles to the specific facts, take a position, cite your sources. Two well-developed principles beat three shallow ones.
Full instructions, the example issue list, and the point breakdown are in the Ethics Discussion board on Blackboard.
Three things to do in class. There is no coding lab today; the graded artifact is the ethics discussion. Use the checklist to track your progress.
Ten questions. Read each scenario and pick the principle or answer that fits, then click Submit. This is practice for the discussion, not a graded item, but it is the fastest way to get the Code into working memory.
Enter your name. It will appear on the score card so you have a record of your work if you want to screenshot it.