Reading over your last homework assignment in which you did background research on a topic, I realized that not everyone got the message that your topic for this question is supposed to be tied in some way to information ethics or some problem/controversy relating to the collection or use of information. Your final project (and some of the upcoming homework assignments) are all tied to information ethics.
To give you an idea of topics that are in the ballpark and from which suitable, highly focused research questions might be developed, here is a list of topics to consider using (and developing further):
- Legal and illegal file sharing (music, movies, TV shows, books)
- Software piracy
- Digital rights management and piracy or file sharing
- Privacy violations by companies who have your data
- Facebook’s changing privacy policies
- The Netflix challenge that released anonymized subscriber data which some said could be used to identify individuals
- AOL search logs being released to researchers that were found to easy to use to identify individuals
- Why can’t I loan an ebook or resell it?
- College access to student email accounts
- Wiretaps and email accounts
- Government monitoring of internet traffic
- Should lawyers picking jurors for a trial be able to research potential jurors who have Facebook pages, etc.?
- Censorship of or labeling of or limiting access to controversial books in public libraries or school libraries
- Punishing professors who are found guilty of plagiarism? Of other forms of academic misconduct or academic fraud?
- Preventing plagiarism by students in colleges and universities
- Should broadband internet access be guaranteed to all?
- Net neutrality: should YouTube be able to pay internet service providers to make sure its content is not slowed down as it travels through the web?
- Internet service providers and subscribers who make heavier than normal use of their accounts
- Google Book Search and monopolies
- Google Book Search and copyright infringement
- What to do about orphan works
- Internet and suicide
- Internet and pro-anorexia groups
- Identity theft and the culture of sharing personal info on the web
- Advertisers and marketers access to your personal usage data on the web
- Sampling in music
- Sampling in films
- Challenges in clearing rights in documentary films that want to reuse lots of copyrighted material
- Passports, RFID, and privacy
- Closing the digital divide
- Cyber-terrorism, cyber-security, cyber-warfare
- Corporate espionage on the internet
- Ownership of virtual property in virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life)
- Effects of expanding copyright law in the US
- Wikileaks and national security
- Gossip on the web
- White hat hackers, black hat hackers
- 4chan
- Mobs on the web
- Disinformation and propaganda on the web
- Traditional publishing vs. publishing on the web
- Open access publishing for scholarly materials
Update: For more ideas, see this blog post I wrote later today about places to get more ideas for topics in information ethics.
