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Cyberethics is "a branch of ethics concerned with behavior in an online environment". In another definition, it is the "exploration of the entire range of ethical and moral issues that arise in cyberspace" while cyberspace is understood to be "the electronic worlds made visible by the Internet." For years, various governments have enacted regulations while organizations have defined policies about cyberethics.

Effects of cybercrime
It is complicated to estimate losses due to cybercrime since there are various types of incidents that can be reported, losses vary with different types of incidents and cybercrime is underreported. In 2014, Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated global losses due to cybercrime to be at $400 billion. In 2023, global victim losses were estimated to be $714 billion with 88.5 victims globally (a rate of 1096 per 100 000 people). Another estimate, from late 2022, estimated costs to the global economy in 2023 to be $8 trillion (short-scale). Statista reported estimates of $8.15 trillion (2023), $9.22 trillion (2024) and $10.29 trillion (2025).

In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mountain Police reports that "the number of Canadians reporting cyber-related incidents continues to rise and cybercrime results in $3 billion in economic losses each year".

Privacy
Cyberspace can be used to either "preserve or destroy" the anonymity of individuals. In terms of ethical issues, privacy is claimed to be "often the most discussed".

History
In the late 19th century, the invention of cameras spurred similar ethical debates as the internet does today. During a seminar of Harvard Law Review in 1890, Samuel D. Warren II and Brandeis defined privacy from an ethical and moral point of view to be:
 * "central to dignity and individuality and boyhood. Privacy is also indispensable to a sense of autonomy—to 'a feeling that there is an area of an individual's life that is totally under his or her control, an area that is free from outside intrusion.' The deprivation of privacy can even endanger a person's health."

Over 100 years later, the internet and proliferation of private data through governments and ecommerce is an area which requires a new round of ethical debate involving a person's privacy.

Privacy can be decomposed to the limitation of others' access to an individual with "three elements of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude." Anonymity refers to the individual's right to protection from undesired attention. Solitude refers to the lack of physical proximity of an individual to others. Secrecy refers to the protection of personalized information from being freely distributed.

Individuals surrender private information when conducting transactions and registering for services. Ethical business practice protects the privacy of their customers by securing information which may contribute to the loss of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude. Credit card information, social security numbers, phone numbers, mothers' maiden names, addresses and phone numbers freely collected and shared over the internet may lead to a loss of Privacy.

Public records search engines and databases are the main culprits contributing to the rise of cybercrime.

Listed below are a few recommendations to restrict online databases from proliferating sensitive personnel information.
 * 1) Exclude sensitive unique identifiers from database records such as social security numbers, birth dates, hometown and mothers' maiden names.
 * 2) Exclude phone numbers that are normally unlisted.
 * 3) Clear provision of a method which allows people to have their names removed from a database.
 * 4) Banning the reverse social security number lookup services.

Private collection
Data warehouses are used today to collect and store huge amounts of personal data and consumer transactions. These facilities can preserve large volumes of consumer information for an indefinite amount of time. Some of the key architectures contributing to the erosion of privacy include databases, cookies and spyware.

Some may argue that data warehouses are supposed to stand alone and be protected. However, the fact is enough personal information can be gathered from corporate websites and social networking sites to initiate a reverse lookup. Therefore, is it not important to address some of the ethical issues regarding how protected data ends up in the public domain?

Identity theft
Seven million Americans fell victim to identity theft in 2002. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, there were 1.1 million cases of identity theft in 2022 and insurance exists against it. As of 2016, it was estimated that identity theft was the most frequent consumer complaint globally for the past fifteen years.

As with other cybercrime, identity theft becomes more prevalent as the number of connected devices as well as the servers that store information keeps growing. The COVID-19 pandemic also provided an opportunity for identity thieves. Another issue is the collection of personal data from devices that users have discarded without a clean up of data. Personal information can be stored in cache, internet history or other temporary files.

Property
Ethical debate has long included the concept of property. This concept has created many clashes in the world of cyberethics. One philosophy of the internet is centered around the freedom of information. The controversy over ownership occurs when the property of information is infringed upon or uncertain.

Intellectual property rights
According to Richard Spinello, a lot of research has been done on intellectual property, not much has been done on fair use.

The ever-increasing speed of the internet and the emergence of compression technology, such as mp3 opened the doors to Peer-to-peer file sharing, a technology that allowed users to anonymously transfer files to each other, previously seen on programs such as Napster or now seen through communications protocol such as BitTorrent. Much of this, however, was copyrighted music and illegal to transfer to other users. Whether it is ethical to transfer copyrighted media is another question.

Proponents of unrestricted file sharing point out how file sharing has given people broader and faster access to media, has increased exposure to new artists, and has reduced the costs of transferring media (including less environmental damage). Supporters of restrictions on file sharing argue that we must protect the income of our artists and other people who work to create our media. This argument is partially answered by pointing to the small proportion of money artists receive from the legitimate sale of media.

A similar debate can be seen over intellectual property rights in respect to software ownership. The two opposing views are for closed source software distributed under restrictive licenses or for free and open source software. The argument can be made that restrictions are required because companies would not invest weeks and months in development if there were no incentive for revenue generated from sales and licensing fees. A counter argument to this is that standing on shoulders of giants is far cheaper when the giants do not hold IP rights. Some proponents for open source believe that all programs should be available to anyone who wants to study them.

Digital rights management (DRM)
With the introduction of digital rights management software, new issues are raised over whether the subverting of DRM is ethical. Some champion the hackers of DRM as defenders of users' rights, allowing the blind to make audio books of PDFs they receive, allowing people to burn music they have legitimately bought to CD or to transfer it to a new computer. Others see this as nothing but simply a violation of the rights of the intellectual property holders, opening the door to uncompensated use of copyrighted media. Another ethical issue concerning DRMs involves the way these systems could undermine the fair use provisions of the copyright laws. The reason is that these allow content providers to choose who can view or listen to their materials making the discrimination against certain groups possible. In addition, the level of control given to content providers could lead to the invasion of user privacy since the system is able to keep tabs on the personal information and activities of users who access their materials. In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) reinforces this aspect to DRM technology, particularly in the way the flow of information is controlled by content providers. Programs or any technologies that attempt to circumvent DRM controls are in violation of one of its provisions (Section 1201).

Accessibility, censorship and filtering
Accessibility, censorship and filtering bring up many ethical issues that have several branches in cyberethics. Many questions have arisen which continue to challenge our understanding of privacy, security and our participation in society. Throughout the centuries mechanisms have been constructed in the name of protection and security. Today the applications are in the form of software that filters domains and content so that they may not be easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention or on a personal and business level through free or content-control software. Internet censorship and filtering are used to control or suppress the publishing or accessing of information. The legal issues are similar to offline censorship and filtering. The same arguments that apply to offline censorship and filtering apply to online censorship and filtering; whether people are better off with free access to information or should be protected from what is considered by a governing body as harmful, indecent or illicit. The fear of access by minors drives much of the concern and many online advocate groups have sprung up to raise awareness and of controlling the accessibility of minors to the internet.

Censorship and filtering occurs on small to large scales, whether it be a company restricting their employees' access to cyberspace by blocking certain websites which are deemed as relevant only to personal usage and therefore damaging to productivity or on a larger scale where a government creates large firewalls which censor and filter access to certain information available online frequently from outside their country to their citizens and anyone within their borders. One of the most famous examples of a country controlling access is the Golden Shield Project, also referred to as the Great Firewall of China, a censorship and surveillance project set up and operated by the People's Republic of China. Another instance is the 2000 case of the League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA), French Union of Jewish Students, vs. Yahoo! Inc (USA) and Yahoo! France, where the French Court declared that "access by French Internet users to the auction website containing Nazi objects constituted a contravention of French law and an offence to the 'collective memory' of the country and that the simple act of displaying such objects (e.g. exhibition of uniforms, insignia or emblems resembling those worn or displayed by the Nazis) in France constitutes a violation of the Article R645-1 of the Penal Code and is therefore considered as a threat to internal public order." Since the French judicial ruling many websites must abide by the rules of the countries in which they are accessible.

Freedom of information
Freedom of information, that is the freedom of speech as well as the freedom to seek, obtain and impart information brings up the question of who or what, has the jurisdiction in cyberspace. The right of freedom of information is commonly subject to limitations dependent upon the country, society and culture concerned.

Generally there are three standpoints on the issue as it relates to the internet. First is the argument that the internet is a form of media, put out and accessed by citizens of governments and therefore should be regulated by each individual government within the borders of their respective jurisdictions. Second, is that, "Governments of the Industrial World... have no sovereignty [over the Internet] ... We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one,... You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." A third party believes that the internet supersedes all tangible borders such as the borders of countries, authority should be given to an international body since what is legal in one country may be against the law in another.

Digital divide
Digital divide refers to "the uneven distribution of information and communication technologies in society."

The term includes differences on a global scale, differences between socioeconomic groups and differences in terms of political engagement of ICT users. Access to technology as well as its usage are considered. The metaphor became popular in the 1990s after the US agency National Telecommunications and Information Administration published its report “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America” in 1995. The report detailed inequalities in the access of Americans to ICTs. Later studies confirmed that "In single nation-states, access to and usage of computer technology was stratified by age, education, ethnicity, race, family structure, gender, income, occupation, and place of residence" while at the global scale, additional factors are added: "gross domestic product, international trade volume, degree of democratization, deregulation of the telecommunications market, density of communication infrastructure, and investments in research and development". The first and second level of the digital divide create another divide, the knowledge divide. page 989

Digital divide is an ethical issue. Writing in particular about Africa, Essien Essien even called it an "ethical crisis". Herman Tavani agrees with Jeremy Moss that not having access to the ICT hinders people's access to knowledge as well as to political decision-making and important information and decreases their economic prosperity. As to what can be done by ICT professionals, Tavani mentions the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative to improve the use of the Internet by disabled persons and the TEK search engine developed by MIT that enables Internet searching via e-mail. He also notes that software and hardware designers need to think about the unintended consequences of their work.

The gap of access between countries or regions of the world is called the global digital divide.

Sexuality and pornography
Sexuality in terms of sexual orientation, infidelity, sex with or between minors, public display and pornography have always stirred ethical controversy. These issues are reflected online to varying degrees. In terms of its resonance, the historical development of the online pornography industry and user-generated content have been the studied by media academics. One of the largest cyberethical debates is over the regulation, distribution and accessibility of pornography online. Hardcore pornographic material is generally controlled by governments with laws regarding how old one has to be to obtain it and what forms are acceptable or not. The availability of pornography online calls into question jurisdiction as well as brings up the problem of regulation, in particular over child pornography, which is illegal in most countries, as well as pornography involving violence or animals, which is restricted within most countries.

Gambling
Gambling is often a topic in ethical debate as some view it as inherently wrong and support prohibition or controls while others advocate for no legal restrictions. "Between these extremes lies a multitude of opinions on what types of gambling the government should permit and where it should be allowed to take place. Discussion of gambling forces public policy makers to deal with issues as diverse as addiction, tribal rights, taxation, senior living, professional and college sports, organized crime, neurobiology, suicide, divorce, and religion." Due to its controversy, gambling is either banned or heavily controlled on local or national levels. The accessibility of the internet and its ability to cross geographic-borders have led to illegal online gambling, often offshore operations. Over the years online gambling, both legal and illegal, has grown exponentially which has led to difficulties in regulation. This enormous growth has even called into question by some the ethical place of gambling online.

Ethical considerations in emerging technology
Though it is impossible to predict all potential ethical implications resulting from new or emerging technology, ethical considerations early in the Research and Development (R&D) phases of a system or technology's lifecycle can help ensure the development of technology that adheres to ethical standards. Several methodologies, to include frameworks and checklists, have been proposed by researchers for the purpose of conducting ethical impact assessments on developing technology. The goal of these assessments is to identify potential ethical scenarios prior to deployment and adoption of an emerging technology. The output from these assessments allow for the mitigation of potential ethical risk and ultimately helps to ensure ethical standards are upheld as technology evolves.

Related organizations
The following organizations are of notable interest in cyberethics debates:
 * International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
 * Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group: Computers and Society (SIGCAS)
 * Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
 * Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
 * International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE)
 * Directions and Implications in Advanced Computing (DIAC)
 * The Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR)
 * Cyber-Rights and Cyber-liberties
 * International Journal of Cyber Ethics in Education (IJCEE)
 * The Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP)