The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

• Doctors have professional organizations
• Which set standards for their members
• These standards are legally enforceable
• In IT we do not have legally recognized professional organizations to set standards
• At least not yet
• But the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, has a Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
• Which you will find here
• The code list 7 general ethical principles
  1. Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing
  2. Avoid harm
  3. Be honest and trustworthy
  4. Be fair and take action not to discriminate
  5. Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts
  6. Respect privacy
  7. Honor confidentiality
• In the coming classes we will be discussing each one of these principles