CyberCitizenship Student Projects:

Ethical Analysis of Online Behavioral Targeting

Instructors:

Cathy Dwyer
Michal Klincewicz

INT197B Syllabus

PrivacyChoice

Ghostery

Dwyer Home Page

Pace University, Spring 2010, New York Campus

Description of CyberCitizenship (INT197B):

CyberCitizenship is a Pace University honors undergraduate learning community that joins joins two disciplines, computing and ethics. The course covers an overview of computing concepts, combined with an introduction to ethics and ethical theory.

While the Internet and information technology are recent inventions, they have provoked age old ethical and moral issues involving privacy, property, responsibility and power. Philosophers have struggled over these issues for centuries. A classical approach to ethics, drawing on the writings of Kant, Mill, and the work of contemporary thinkers, is applied ethical quandaries triggered by rapid advances in the power and reach of computing technologies.

Description of Assignment:

Throughout the semester the class analyzed issues of privacy and the Internet, with a focus on practices of online advertising. Hands on computer activities included the capture and documentation of specific instances of tracking mechanisms used by a variety of companies. This was accomplished by examining data left behind on student laptops (i.e., in the browser cache and cookies), and with the use of advertising visualization tools such as PrivacyChoice and Ghostery.

Using the Ethical Theories and analytic approaches learned during the semester, student groups conducted an ethical analysis on the use of online advertising by a specific company. The groups selected a Web site/company for analysis, collected evidence of the nature of tracking being conducted on the site, and based on the evidence collected, carried out an ethical analysis of the tracking that was found. Each group wrote an email message directly to the company, describing their ethical analysis and asking for a response.

Links to Student Projects:

Analysis of Pandora's Online Advertising (Rahul, Nick, Nicole and Brian)
Pandora's response: none to date

T-Mobile's Online Advertising (Adam, Bethany, Cara and Rita)
T-Mobile's response: none to date

Analysis of living.health.com Web Site (Vlad, Giacomo and Austin)
Living Health's response: none to date

Online Advertising on the Gaiam Web Site (Sam, Geri, Dianne and Gloria)
Gaiam's response: none to date

date of last update: 5/21/2010