CSC208 Elliott—Structured Outline

Sample Outline—draft

Voluntary business rules that prohibit the storing of deleted email messages: An ethical analysis under Social Contract Theory.

Introduction: This paper proposes a solution to the threat to privacy when email providers such as Yahoo and Google store permanent copies of all email sent by users - even after the email is thought to have been deleted. The problem is clarified, and a solution is proposed. The Social Contract Theory (SCT) framework is used to make claims that the solution is ethical. Finally, drawbacks to the proposed solution are discussed.

The problem in society

When email providers store permanent copies of email, users of the system may find that private email messages which are appropriate in one context are used years later in an entirely inapproprite context.

Consider the example of John who discusses with his wife Sarah the difficulties their son Abe is having in school.

Email messages may be about people that have no knowledge that the message was ever sent, leading us to what amounts to a permanent record of gossip.

Companies can be bought and sold: a well-intentioned email provider who has saved copies of email strictly so that mistakenly deleted messages can be recovered upon request, may sell to an unethical provider who decides to sell the messages to marketing companies.

The proposed solution

If there are enough people who collectively agree to follow certain rules, a new constraint can be established that requires participating email providers to permanently destroy those email messages that users have deleted.

For the system to work, both sender and receiver email providers must be formal participants in the agreement.

An auditing body must be established that verifies adherence to the policy, by participating email providers, of permamently deleting email messages.

While agreeing to audits, and paying for them, has costs, the market will attract providers to this policy because of increased users, and thus increased advertising revenue.

The voluntary permanent deletion of email messages is ethical under Social Contract Theory.

Social Contract Theory (SCT) is an ethical framework that allows us to determine, in a formal way, whether or not a proposed governing law should be adopted in an ethics-based society.

In the way we will use it here, SCT states that individuals will give up sovereignty to a governing body when it benefits the self-interest of rational people, and as long as everyone else does likewise.

Our "society" is here constrained to the users of email, and their providers; the stakeholders are the owners of email provider companies, all participating email users, and the potential future consumers of stored email.

Users of email will have the basic right to control whether email messages under their control can be permanently deleted from all storage devices.

Email providers will give up the right to control messages they have stored.

All email providers have the freedom to choose to participate in such a system by agreeing to a regular audit of their email deletion policies and the software that implements them.

The permament deletion rule benefits the least members of society, where in this case the least members of our artificial society are the standard users of email.

No basic rights of any of the stakeholders have been violated; all stakeholders may claim a full set of basic rights within the system.

The negative effects of the proposed system fall mostly on the most advantaged members of the email system: large companies that seek to profit from the stored email of others.

Thus, according to the application of SCT, our proposed system is ethical, as follows:

Problems with the proposed solution:

It is possible that an email provider could sell access to an email message, only to later find that a user now wants that email message permanently deleted.

A formal governing body would have to be established to set auditing rules, and this is both expensive and problematic.

The system does not account for email that leaves the system of voluntary participants.

When senders include the "copy the original" option in email, copies of deteled emails may still exist attached the body of extant email messages that have not been deleted.

Conclusions:

Conclusion: Auditing-verified permanent deletion of email is feasible. It is ethical under Social Contract Theory. For these two reasons it should be adopted.

Summary: In this paper we have given the details of an email system in which participating providers would voluntarily agree to audits guaranteeing that the email deletions of users are permanent. We discussed specific threats to society such as the example of John where information from a permanet email message was used in an unethical context. Our proposed solution was shown in five detailed ways to be technically feasible. We showed that our solution is ethical under the specific constraints of Social Contrat Theory, including Rawl's Theory of Justice. Lastly we raised concerns that might be encountered with such a system.

Note: In this outline we used an organization that includes sections, statement of the problem, a proposed solution, an analysis, and so on. Your structure might be quite different. It is up to you. As long as the result is clear, there are many good ways to go about creating a structure.

In general, once your outline is clear, with a suitable structure, most of the hard work is finished.