2020 Spring, First Writing Assignment

You will be assigned a website in order to analyze its privacy policy and terms of use.

Please read the privacy policy and terms of use for the website that you have been assigned. (If you are using any browser extensions, you may have to suppress some of those to get to some of these pages.)

Please write a paper of at least 1500 words (about four pages of double-spaced material) covering:

  1. A summary of the website and of the website's policies. These policies must include those that you received links for, and may include other policies that you find relevant. If there is an effective date cited, or a last updated date, please include these. Many of the websites for this assignment have very recently updated policies, including as recently as this month.
  2. Places where you see positive and negative aspects to these policies. These positive and negative aspects should include some mention of ethical principles; the ethical principles that you use are up to you. The ethical principles that you reference can be normatively formulated (for example, you could explicitly invoke some form of utilitarianism). Or you could use applied principles from a particular code of ethics. (These are not mutually exclusive, and you are welcome to use both normative and applied formulations.)
  3. A comparison and contrast with the Electronic Frontier Alliance Principles.
  4. As part of your summary, you should note where you find any of the website's policies violate some provision or provisions of any code of applied ethics that we have discussed in class.

The principles for part 3 are: 
  Electronic Frontier Alliance Principles

   Free Expression:
     People should be able to speak their minds to whoever will listen.

   Security:
     Technology should be trustworthy and answer to its users.

   Privacy:
     Technology should allow private and anonymous speech, and allow users to set their own parameters about what to share with whom.

   Creativity:
     Technology should promote progress by allowing people to build on the ideas, creations, and inventions of others.

   Access to Knowledge:
     Curiosity should be rewarded, not stifled.

   (https://www.eff.org/electronic-frontier-alliance)

For part 4, the relevant ethical codes are:

  1. ACM code of ethics and professional conduct
  2. ACM/IEEE Joint Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice
  3. Australian Computer Society's Code of Professional Conduct
  4. LOPSA / Usenix System Administrator's Code of Ethics
  5. Archimedean Oath

Please make sure that you put your name and email address in your paper. Both the drafts and the papers are to submitted on Canvas (unless you elect to have me review these during my office hours; in that case, if I post a grade then you don't have to submit the paper on Canvas.)

Here's the schedule for this exercise:

  1. Your first draft is due by the beginning of class on Monday, February 10. You will not receive a grade on this draft, and the only penalty for not submitting a satisfactory draft is a reduction of 1 point in your class participation score.
  2. You will receive your marked-up draft by Monday, February 24.
  3. You may come by my office hours with your draft or with your final paper before its due date (and not after). If it is your draft, I will be happy to review it with you; if it is final paper, I will be glad to grade your paper and give you a final grade at that time. (If this proves to be popular, we may have to arrange an individual session, but it's not been a problem in previous semesters.)
  4. The final paper will be due by 11:59pm on Monday, March 2.
  5. Please remember that all assignments are governed by the FSU Academic Honor Policy. For all assignments at FSU, plagiarism is a serious violation of the Academic Honor Policy; for this assignment, no group work is allowed (you must write this paper on your own, and not in collaboration with anyone else, either at FSU or elsewhere).