Firm Footing, Long Walk: We Begin to Look at Web Ethics

Angela Gunn Consumer Reports WebWatch Web Ethics Columnist>

What does it mean to talk about being ethical online?

Most of us have an idea about how to be ethical in our regular lives. We started to formulate our ideas as soon as we were old enough to pay attention to our parents; it expanded as we made friends, went to school, and (perhaps) got religious instruction. Our ethics were challenged over time, and we practiced applying them to various situations. These days, even if we don't consciously ponder what are our ethics are, most of us have a sense that we practice them as we make our way through the world.

But for most of us, being online doesn't feel like being out in "the world" — generally, you're sitting alone at a computer, looking at words and pictures. No one's around. Now who do you practice ethics on?

Ethics, after all, isn't something that gets practiced alone; it's done in relation to others. To whom is the Internet user relating when she pulls up her keyboard? Every other Net user, young and old, from every culture? The person who built a specific Web page? How do they relate to her? And are any of these relationships as important as that between the user and the "real live" human beings in the next room?

Talking about online ethics is a fun mental exercise, but ethics only get interesting when you up the stakes by stating what's of value and how you think the world ought to respect valued things. If we can't come up with some values, we're in for a pretty short column. Shall we get started, then?

Let's begin with something that people take seriously, online or off: Their belongings. We value money and property and how they are treated in the world. That's pretty clear to you, of course, since you're visiting a consumer-affairs site. We've got ideas about how people ought to manage money, especially our money. Even if you're not one of those people who ponders the deeper implications of investing in EcoFriendlyMomAndPop Inc. versus MegaIndustrialTechnoCorp LLC, you probably expect that once a company has access to your money, it'll do what it promised it would — whether that's increasing wealth or furnishing a lawnmower that doesn't explode.

What else? Web users, like most human beings, also value personal effort. Most people understand that the act of creating something gives it value to its maker, as any kid building a castle in the sandbox will testify. The music industry, fuming over online MP3 trading on services such as KaZaA and the late Napster, claim that users violate the rights of artists by downloading their songs without paying. Those who build the Net's Web sites often feel violated when others copy and re-use their artwork, or deface their pages, or even on occasion when they "deep-link" to a part of the Web site that the owner doesn't think they should. Ordinary computer owners wring their hands when viruses wreak havoc on the files and programs they've put on their machines.

We sense, too, that creators' rights are closely connected to their responsibilities. If we happen across a page discussing Product X, for instance, we value that information differently depending on whether we know it to have been created by Product X Enterprises or by Joe Consumer. Knowing the creator of the page — and, therefore, the entity behind the information shared and viewpoint expressed — gives greater credence to the information found there. Web users feel a sense of betrayal when a page from Product X Enterprises claims to be the brainchild of Joe Consumer (or vice versa). On Amazon.com, for instance, smart consumers pay less attention to "reviews" left by the author ("This is the greatest book ever!") and focus on evaluations by readers who presumably have no stake in the purchase. When health is at stake, wise Web users trust sites put up by medical authorities and those in the know about how specific drugs work rather than Web pages with wild-eyed claims by people who may not have a background in medicine.

In the online world, our offline ideas about property are transmuted into an idea that our efforts on the Net are equivalent to property. As one of the earliest online communities used to say, "you own your own words" — and your pictures, and your Web pages, just as an artist has a unique kind of ownership of a painting she's created. Property's a slippery concept when we're talking about digital creations — endlessly copyable without harming the original, easy to "take" without causing anything to go missing. With all the physical material that makes up the Net (computers, wires, electrical grid) hidden in the background, and with some stuff that used to be physical (recorded music, the store clerk that takes your credit-card number) now just more bits wafting about, we smart humans have latched on to the Net's absolute lowest common denominator: If you can summon the strength to click on a link, you have committed effort to the Net. (Welcome! You've got ethical issues!)

Just as some people confuse law and ethics, others — the dear souls wringing their hands over people who cc: too many people in email — confuse etiquette and ethics. Ethics is neither a body of legal edicts nor Miss Manners. But just as we can borrow from law to shape our online ethics, we can borrow from etiquette to improve our ethics by talking about how to behave toward one another online as we connect effort with those who expend effort. Only the Net's most casual users, after all, expend effort that affects nobody else. Participating in e-mail, instant messaging, discussions, polls, and so forth takes users beyond simply dealing with other people's efforts and puts them in contact with the people themselves…sort of.

Maddeningly, just when you get to the one thing we're pretty sure the Net has — other people on it — things get weird, and we have to ask questions like whether you can be more than one person online, and if who you are on the Net has anything to do with who you are off it.

Before we tackle the problem of identity, let's lay one more piece of groundwork for talking about online ethics: One person's efforts can affect other people. (We'll work out later what we mean by a "person.") Claiming that one's action can't hurt other people just because one isn't standing in the same room with them is dangerous nonsense in the modern world. Acting online and then claiming that the resultant thoughts aren't your problem is like firing a gun and disavowing responsibility for the bullets.

We now have three basic ideas on which to build Internet ethics: Money and property are important, our efforts on the Net are a kind of property, and our efforts can affect other people. Sturdy stuff, but how does it apply to free speech, business-consumer relations, cookies, viruses, vigilantes, credit-card fraud, online auctions, privacy…? Clearly we've got work to do. See you back here next week, and then every two weeks after that.

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Gunn is the co-founder of, and former Internet ethics columnist for, Yahoo! Internet Life and is currently the technology editor for Time Out New York weekly magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for PC Magazine, MSNBC.com, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, CNN.com, Seattle Weekly, LA Weekly, and other publications.