The Shatterproof Fallacy

How many times have computer novices been told “Don’t worry, the worst you can do with your computer is accidentally erase or mess up a file — and even if you do that, you can probably get it back. You can’t really hurt anything.”

Although computers are tools, they are tools that can harm. Yet most users are totally oblivious to the fact that they have actually hurt someone else through actions on their computer. Using electronic-mail on the Internet to denigrate someone constitutes malicious chastisement of someone in public. In the nondigital world, people can be sued for libel for these kinds of actions; but on the Internet, users find it convenient to not be held responsible for their words.

Forwarding E-mail without at least the implied permission of all of its authors often leads to harm or embarrassment of participants who thought they were conferring privately. Using E-mail to stalk someone, to send unwanted mail or junk mail, and to send sexual innuendoes or other material that is not appreciated by the recipient all constitute harmful use of computers.

Software piracy is another way in which computer users can hurt people. Those people are not only programmers and struggling software companies but also end users who must pay artificially high prices for the software and systems they buy and the stockholders and owners of successful companies who deserve a fair return on their investment.

It is astonishing that a computer user would defend the writing of computer viruses. Typically, the user says, “My virus is not a malicious one. It does not cause any harm. It is a benign virus. The only reason I wrote it was to satisfy my intellectual curiosity and to see how it would spread.” Such users truly miss out on the ramifications of their actions. Viruses, by definition, travel from computer to computer without the knowledge or permission of the computer’s owner or operator.

Viruses are just like other kinds of contaminants (e.g., contaminants in a lake) except that they grow (replicate) much like a cancer. Computer users cannot know they have a virus unless they specifically test their computers or diskettes for it. If the neighbor of a user discovers a virus, then the user is obliged to test his or her system and diskettes for it and so are the thousand or so other neighbors that the user and the user’s neighbors have collectively.

The hidden costs of computer viruses are enormous. Even if an experienced person with the right tools needs only 10 minutes to get rid of a virus — and even if the virus infects only 4 or 5 computers and only 10 or 20 floppy disks in a site (these are about the right numbers for a computer virus incident in a site of 1000 computers), then the people at the site are obliged to check all 1,000 computers and an average of 35,000 diskettes (35 active diskettes per computer) to find out just which five computers are infected.

As of early 1995, there were demonstrably more than a thousand people actively writing, creating, or intentionally modifying the more than 6000 computer viruses that currently exist — and at least as many people knowingly participated in spreading them. Most of these people were ignorant of the precise consequences of their actions.

In 1993, there was a minor scandal in the IRS when clerical IRS employees were discovered pulling computerized tax returns of movie stars, politicians, and their neighbors — just for the fun of it. What is the harm? The harm is to the privacy of taxpayers and to the trust in the system, which is immeasurably damaged in the minds of U.S. citizens. More than 350 IRS employees were directly implicated in this scandal. When such large numbers of people do not understand the ethical problem, then the problem is not an isolated one. It is emblematic of a broad ethical problem that is rooted in widely held fallacies.

The shatterproof fallacy is the pervasive feeling that what a person does with a computer could hurt at most a few files on the machine. It stems from the computer generation’s frequent inability to consider the ramifications of the things we do with computers before we do them.

The Candy-from-a-Baby Fallacy

Guns and poison make killing easy (i.e., it can be done from a distance with no strength or fight) but not necessarily right. Poisoning the water supply is quite easy, but it is beyond the gut-level acceptability of even the most bizarre schizophrenic.

Software piracy and plagiarism are incredibly easy using a computer. Computers excel at copying things, and nearly every computer user is guilty of software piracy. But just because it is easy does not mean that it is right.

Studies by the Software Publisher’s Association (SPA) and Business Software Alliance (BSA) show that software piracy is a multibillion dollar problem in the world today — clearly a huge problem.

By law and by any semblance of intellectual property held both in Western societies and most of the rest of the world, copying a program for use without paying for it is theft. It is no different than shoplifting or being a stowaway on an airliner, and an average user would never consider stealing a box of software from a computer store’s display case or stowing away on a flight because the plane had empty seats.