This is the sixth edition of a college textbook for a computer science or information technology course. The preface indicates that the major changes in this edition are a greater emphasis on virtue ethics and an elimination of references to “scholarly tomes” in the further reading sections. Rather, there are lists of current articles and videos available on the Internet. As the basic book has been around for about ten years, it has developed some standing in the field. It has the typical instructor resources, which this review does not examine.

The book contains the following ten chapters: “Catalysts for Change” (historical background); “Introduction to Ethics” (classical ethical theory); “Networked Communications” (addressing topics such as spam, censorship, children, and Internet addiction); “Intellectual Property” (legal issues); “Information Privacy” (including disclosures, data mining, and consumer backlash); “Privacy and the Government” (US legal issues); “Computer and Network Security” (including hacking, malware, cybercrime, and online voting); “Computer Reliability” (including data entry, billing errors, system failures, software engineering, and liability); “Professional Ethics” (including the Software Engineering Code of Ethics and whistle-blowing), and “Work and Wealth” (including globalization, the digital divide, and the winner-take-all society). Appendix A addresses plagiarism. An interesting feature is a brief interview with a recognized authority at the end of each chapter. There are also some case studies. The chapters end with a summary, review questions, discussion questions, in-class exercises, further reading and viewing, and references.

This is a very readable text with the chapters broken into subsections. It may be utilized at any level. It has a complete index. My suggestions for a future edition are to introduce color for greater visual appeal and to develop a standalone global issues chapter addressing in greater detail such topics as European Union (EU) privacy, national censorship, and international computer crime. Certainly, even without these changes, this is an excellent overview of a complex and unfolding topic.

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