week 3 task 2 section a

Ethics
If we were to take a look at the world without the Internet in general it is seen as ethically wrong to hide your identity. It is important to take into consideration what sort of lie is a terrible lie. Firstly to tell someone that a person is dieing when there not, everyone can understand that this is ethically wrong. However if a woman had been sexually abused by her husband, it is her right to lie and even keep secret in an event of an abortion.

Therefore to purposely mislead people online for example within chat rooms could be ethically wrong. Mainly because if a person is going online for a relationship trust is an important issue, if people cant be truthful in the first instance then this seems somewhat ridiculous.

At the same time the withholding of bank details and addresses that could reveal someone’s identity and personal information is ethically normal because of the worrying increase in identidy theft. 

Again, it is ethically acceptable to keep children’s personal details private, keeping their name and address in order to keep paedophiles at bay is understandable and rational. This is mainly because with chat rooms "you can never tell who anyone is" (Sanderson, 2004: 291)Children  are young and vulnerable and so are easily manipulated and thus are at risk of sex offenders. Schomburget suggests “children needing attention and affections may respond to an offender in positive ways” (Schomburget, 2008: 398). In the analysis of a Harry Potter forum http://www.harrypotterforum.com/ forum, quintessentially directed at children the commentators on the forum kept their identities secret. For example the commentators use name such as “angelix” and nothing about their age or real names are released. Even photos were virtual images and not their own.