Ethical issues online

Submitted by Feargal on Tue, 25/01/2011 - 17:09
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What are the main issues

The main issues are:

  • Data protection
  • Child protection
  • Location of servers
  • Security
  • Who your information is used by once you add your details to a site

What could be done about these issues

We think that companies should have to sign up to an ethical code of practice. Web browsers should then have an icon - like the padlock for secure sites - that shows the user that this website has signed up to the ethical code of practice.

Who should do this?

It could be a government initiative or it may be more successful if companies introduce it themselves to give themselves a competitive advantage.

This is a a final version
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Submitted by timdavies on Thu, 03/02/2011 - 16:35.

 This is a really interesting

 This is a really interesting idea. 

The technology behind the Padlock you see on websites has recently been updated with something called 'Extended Validation' certificates (at the moment the padlock just tells that you connection to a website is encrypted; extended validation certificates tell you that someone (the signing authority) has checked that website is who they say they are). 

It would be possible to set up an Extended Validation service and try and get it known for checking out the ethics of a website - building your ethics idea right into the browser itself. Of course - getting lots of sites to sign up this could be tricky - but it's certainly an idea worth exploring. 

Perhaps you could maintain a list of sites that you feel respect your rights and circulate that in schools and colleges as well - as that would help put pressure on other sites to work better.