Ethics Reflection

The ethics codes for engineers comes in many different forms including Electrical Engineering-

IEEE, Civil-ASCE, Mechanical-ASME and many others. They each provide guidelines for an engineer in

their respective fields. These ethical codes are guideline for how we as engineers make decisions. These

decisions are the moral choices we must make to not only ensure the public’s trust in us, and other

engineers, but also friends, family, co-workers and our employers. Our ethics codes will prepare us and

allow us to make better choices when we are faced with an ethical situation.

These ethical situations are something that all engineers will be faced with and it is something

we must know how to deal with. In the past when dealing with an ethical dilemma you must first

understand how these two dilemmas came to be in the first place. After you must ask yourself which

ethical belief you truly hold as the most important to up hold, this of course is not always an easy task. If

this dilemma is one that not only affects you, but also consumers of a product you are working on you

must consider what they would believe to be the better choice.

An example of an ethical dilemma would be one given in our group meeting. We discussed what

we would do if we found a security loophole in a company that affected hundreds of thousands, if not

millions of individuals. Would we report the issue at all? Would we report the issue to the company and

then post about it on social media? Or would we only report it to the company and never mention it to

their customers? As engineers, and as human beings at the very minimum we agreed you are obligated

to report the issue to the proper people. However, there was not a unified answer on whether to post

about it on social media. I personally would, after the company was given enough time to fix the issue.

This is to ensure the public is aware of the flaw, but now knows the company took high priority to fix the

issue. It also ensures the company does not disregard your notice and not fix the issue. Some did not

want to post on social media as to allow the company to fix the issue their way and notify their
customers of it how they would like. I disagreed with this because you can’t always be sure another

company will have the public’s best interest in mind and this is one way you can ensure they do.

The case study discussed in our meeting was the Amazon Echo murder in 2015. There was an

Amazon Echo at the scene of a murder and the police wanted Amazon to hand over the recordings.

Amazon refused stating they needed “a valid and binding legal demand” in order to release the

recordings to police. Amazon has a responsibility to all their customers to not hand over data without

their consent, or a “binding legal document” forcing them too. Had they not it would set a bad

precedent by allowing police and possibly other companies to request things like Echo/Alexa recordings

for whatever purposes they want and without a valid reason. This is your personal data and should not

be easily obtained by other entities. By Amazon not handing over the data they showed a faithfulness to

their customers that they will not easily give up their customers data and shows that they are being

honest when they say that. However, had Amazon given up this data they would be helping the police

possibly solve a murder case, which I think most can agree would be a good thing. But they didn’t

because they are already obligated to protect your personal data. Therefore, I don’t believe they had

the virtue of charity in this situation.

As an engineer I know I will be faced with tough decisions that will not only affect me, but

possible hundreds if not thousands of others. Because of this I will always keep in mind the ethical codes

I personally live by, but also the ethics codes of my place of employment. This ensures I am being the

best I can be and gives me the trust of people I work with and provide products or services too.