A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet (3rd... at Dominant Systems Book Store

KEY BENEFIT: Baase explores timely social, legal, philosophical, ethical, political, constitutional and economic implications of computing from a computer scientist's perspective. KEY TOPICS: Coverage of the issues readers face both as members of a technological society and as professionals in computer-related fields. Adds new information on phenomena such as the growth of amateur work on the Web, blogs, video sharing, collaborative works (such as Wikipedia), and social networking. Includes new privacy topics such as cameras in cell phones, access to our search queries and all sorts of data we put on the Web, social networking, location tracking, high-tech surveillance systems, and some anti-terrorism programs. Updated chapters on intellectual property, professional ethics and responsibilities, and crime. MARKET: A useful reference for computer science professionals or anyone interested in learning more about computing technology and its arising issues.

Customer Reviews & Comments
This is an ethics book of course, so I will keep the writing short: This book is written very well, and is suitable for someone whose never taken an ethics course before--which wasn't me, but I changed majors and info-tech ethics was required. The exercises are the most valuable part of the book but it will take a good teacher to make the most out of them: I got lucky there. Baase does a very good job of hitting all the high-notes and gray-area cases that have popped up in the last 20 or so years as a result of new technologies. But at the end of the course I didn't feel I ended up taking anything away that I couldn't have learned by myself. The book is really very wordy in my opinion--even for an ethics book--and doesn't hit enough ethical theory for my taste. It's great for its target market though, but don't think it'll work magic if you've already had some 'traditional' ethics courses.

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