Ethical Issues in Pervasive Computing Security

Abstract: The importance of awareness with regard information systems (IS) security has been recently acknowledged. This paper studies the applicability of one aspect of the awareness approach, namely ethics and morality, to the context of pervasive computing. This paper presents an overview of ethical theories by discussing descriptivism and universal prescriptivism, the latter of which is then applied to the context of IS security. A model of ethical thinking in organizational context is developed, problem areas and hypotheses are identified and preliminary solutions are presented. The model is applied to a pervasive computing security scenario where it reveals key problem areas that are ad-dressed with the help of the awareness approach and the preliminary solutions presented.

Keywords: ethics, information systems security, awareness