On the Internet, people can speak openly about subjects they want to keep private and order sensitive items like prescriptions from the privacy of their homes. However, major ethical issues arise consequently. The Internet makes it very easy to say potentially damaging, even libelous, things about other people. In a collection of essays, "The Offensive Internet," Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, calls the Web "a shame-free zone in which (we) can inflict shame on others." However, refusing the right to anonymous speech can have a chilling effect on political and other types of controversial speech.
Privacy raises ethical questions in the Internet age. Online activity is tracked, recorded and sold to marketing and advertising companies. Is this monitoring a breach of privacy? Almost anyone can easily find your personal information online -- including age, salary, marital status, income and property value. You may be tempted to snoop around in others' personal lives, which is ethically questionable. Photographs some teachers post on social networking sites have led to the loss of their jobs; such punishment -- citing an appearance with alcohol or an intoxicated state as violation of a morals clause -- has ignited controversy and discussion in the privacy debate.
Online banking and shopping are undoubtedly convenient. However, how safe is your financial information? Even the most secure systems can be hacked. The ethics of hacking, however, remains a gray area. Some hackers, called "black hat" hackers, or "crackers," hack for criminal purposes, such as stealing bank account and credit card numbers. Others, known as "white hat" hackers, use their skills to help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their networks. Technology journalist Greg Wiles in USA Today states that many former black hat hackers actually become professional security experts -- a fact that complicates an already murky ethical issue.
Intellectual property laws protect the exclusive rights of an author to his or her original work, but now that so much text, music and film are digitally available, it's easy to make and distribute copies of copyright-protected material. Few would argue that illegal downloading is stealing, and thus ethically wrong. However, what about using pieces of others' work in digital art forms like mash-up and remix? Internet law professor Lawrence Lessig argues that we must reconsider copyright law and ethics to allow for the emergence of new forms of creativity.
Real-life violence against others is, in most circumstances, not only illegal, but also ethically wrong. Yet people spend hours every day playing digital games that simulate violence in realistic detail. Is it ethical to enjoy or support such play? The debate about the real-life effects of violent video game play rages on. Psychologist Craig Anderson of Iowa State University analyzed 130 research studies on the subject, involving more than 130,000 subjects from a wide range of backgrounds; the results, Anderson argues, show a clear link between aggressive behavior and violent video game play. Others, like professor Dmitri Williams, argue that such studies are too short-term and don't account for the wide variety of games -- some of which, he believes, lead to problem-solving and other skills.