Just because you can do something, does not mean you should!

General, 0

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With all the advances of technology, sometimes our abilities to access data far exceeds guidelines that have been set for what we should or should not do as we develop applications. Where do the boundaries of what we can do cross the line of what we should do? What responsibility do we have towards the users of the applications that we create? Quite often the average user of web and mobile applications do not understand privacy policies, have no idea why the application needs certain information (sometimes it doesn't!), and are afraid to not give permissions because the app might not work. They also often have no idea how dangerous it can be to have all their information out there. Some professions have a governing agency to enforce compliance to an ethical standard, but there is no governing agency over software developers. Does this mean we have no responsibility to be ethical in the software that we create or do we need to hold ourselves to some standard? And what would that standard be? I have had an interest in ethics/business ethics since my first year in University when I took a business ethics course. With all the headlines about applications invading privacy of the user, I have often wondered what individual developers thought about the privacy of their users as they were developing the application. It occurs to me that it is possible they had not even given it a thought. This is an exploration into how different ethical mores apply to the work that we do as software developers and what responsibilities we have as developers to the users of the software that we create.