Consider the scenario in which a group of your fellow students approach you to see whether you are interested in participating in a project that is intended to be a commercial venture. The group has come up with a novel approach to obtaining large numbers of e-mail addresses. This requires the development of some software, and once this is used it will be possible to develop a very extensive e-mail address list. Subsequently, this information is to be sold to companies involved in spam advertising. You voice some initial reservations based upon your concern that this may not be entirely legal/ethical. However, you are normally based overseas – specifically in third world countries. Since the team is to be based in the UK and the software is going to be used to locate e-mail addresses that are normally based outside the UK, you are assured that you will be breaking no UK law.
How would you proceed? Do you consider that this is a legal/ethical undertaking? In the case that you are not entirely happy with the possible ethical aspects of this venture(but are satisfied that you will not be breaking UK law), would you still be willing to participate if the level of remuneration is sufficient? At what point would personal remuneration override any ethical reservations that you may have?
Let us suppose that you do become involved in this undertaking but that you subsequently find that the software that you helped to develop is not being used to locate e-mail addresses that are normally based outside the UK, but in addition e-mail address within the UK, and these are being sold on to companies who specialize in spam advertising? Does this compromise your legal position?
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Commercial venture is a great opportunity to enhance skills in terms of software development although the term commercial venture is business enterprise involving some risk in expectation of gain. It is good to be involved in opportunities such as handling large email list together with expert developers, experience like this is a rewarding gain for programmers because it can boost skills in software development. However, considering that spam advertising is a threat to the privacy and security of web users, as a programmer and developer i would not rather to be involved in such business venture, unethical activity may cause trouble to my professionalism and conscience. Through spam advertising, it would harm legitimate account due to the effect of flooding. Doing unethical activity for self interest is a big "NO", this must be the stand for professional who against unethical doings. Since spam is a global threat to the web citizens, participating in said business venture some law will be violated and every personnel behind it will suffer the consequences.
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