2. In Class Activity - Acknowledgement of Sources and Data Quality
Issues related to information systems
There are a number of ethical issues related to Information Systems and Databases as the videos that you watched already depict – there are however many more issues than they covered.
Three in particular are as follows:
Acknowledgement of data sources (particularly relevant to students)
Databases collect data from a diverse set of data sources
Private Data
Copyright Data
Reasons to acknowledge data stored in a database
Justification of Output
Providing Mechanism for tracking and auditing data
Requirements of Source organisation.
Access, ownership and control of data
Many database store private information.
Access needs to be controlled - Privacy Act
Owners of Private Data need access - Freedom of Information Act
Once you volunteer to put your information into a database - who owns that data?
Policy statement documents for the database describe access rules
Accuracy and reliability of data
Data Integrity
Data Verification
Activity 1
From your own knowledge (or that of something incredibly clever like wikipedia, write a couple of sentences on each of the above.
Current and Emerging Trends:
data warehouses, data mining and data matching
Another really contemporary issue is that of, data warehouses, data mining and data matching, with the continual discussion about the Smart ID Card, the Automatic Number Plate Recognition System and the iCloud, not to mention what happens with data on social media sites.
How much data is too much, for a company to know about you?
If you didn’t understand data matching before, you should now….
To understand Data Warehousing read this:
“At the time of writing (2007) Wal-Mart – an American retail chain – claims to have the largest data warehouses in the world. Wal-Mart uses their data warehouse for many significant business decisions such as identifying the most profitable locations for new stores, determining under performing products and stores and optimising the amount of stock of each product held at each store. The Wal-Mart data warehouse contains a record of every scanned item purchased in any of its thousands of stores.” Davis IPT HSC
To understand Data Mining read this:
The aim of data mining is to discover new knowledge through the exploration of data. Data mining is a form of detailed data analysis used on large databases – usually data warehouses. Data mining is performed by software that uses various different strategies in an attempt to uncover patterns that are non-obvious within the data.
The data mining software explores the data searching for relationships that were never planned. These relationships are rarely definite nor do they necessarily apply to all the data, rather they tend to be general trends known as patterns. For example, data mining software may detect a pattern indicating that men tend to buy luxury food items early in the week if they are also purchasing nappies.
Describe how Facebook have been allowed to act in this manner.
Describe a situation where facebook could use data mining of their huge data warehouse to make use of your data
Research and see if there are any rights you have related to use of your data by companies such as facebook, twitter and so on. Hint …Try the federal privacy act 1988, freedom of information act 1982, NSW privacy and personal information protection act 1998 as a starting point. Also try the Who owns the data - More information document found in this stem.
Accuracy and reliability of data:
Take a look at the following internet pictures, sites etc and see if you can work out the problem with them
