Towards a theory of privacy in the information age
ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society
The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy
Ethics and Information Technology
Ethics and Information Technology
TASE '07 Proceedings of the First Joint IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering
The Metaphilosophy of Information
Minds and Machines
Ethics and the Practice of Software Design
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy
The Impact of Context on Employee Perceptions of Acceptable Non-Work Related Computing
International Journal of Technoethics
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The paper investigates the ethics of information transparency (henceforth transparency). It argues that transparency is not an ethical principle in itself but a pro-ethical condition for enabling or impairing other ethical practices or principles. A new definition of transparency is offered in order to take into account the dynamics of information production and the differences between data and information. It is then argued that the proposed definition provides a better understanding of what sort of information should be disclosed and what sort of information should be used in order to implement and make effective the ethical practices and principles to which an organisation is committed. The concepts of "heterogeneous organisation" and "autonomous computational artefact" are further defined in order to clarify the ethical implications of the technology used in implementing information transparency. It is argued that explicit ethical designs, which describe how ethical principles are embedded into the practice of software design, would represent valuable information that could be disclosed by organisations in order to support their ethical standing.