Ever since Mason (1986) proposed to apply Privacy, Accuracy, Property and Accessibility (PAPA) to be the guiding principles of ethical issues in the information age, PAPA has been used widely in studies such as human behavior and information technology; information management, organization science, as well as the foundation of information security system designs. PAPA was ahead in its time, and still remains great impacts for us to take a profound thinking today by its three basic questions raised in the article:
- Whether the kind of society being created is the one we want?
- Should we pay sepcial concern on the PAPA issues since we are in the forefront of creating this new society?
- Although information shape the intellectual capital, the weakness of building intellectual capital is that people's intellectual capital will decrease:
- whenever they lose their personal information without being compensated for it,
- when they are precluded access to information which is of value to them,
- when they have revealed information they hold intimate, or
- when they find out that the information upon which their living depends is in error.
Problems and Issues have been identified in table1; the final “should” and “should not” with some cases analysis for PAPA guiding principles are proposed in table 2. Until today, we have seen how information technology progress has been phenomenal. We also have been challenged by information ethical crisis we never had before. Could it be that a balance between human sentiment, issues of law and justice, and moral or ethical concerns emerged within PAPA of information age, we are still in the process of wondering, indeed.
Table1: Issues and Problems of PAPA
Table2: A question of Should or Should Not
Note: This review was mainly completed as a homework while taking the Humanity Informatics Class lectured by Professor Ching-Chun Hsieh in May 2007.