What if companies claimed ownership of your personal details or photos and charged you to prevent them being made public? Or if devices were controlled by buggy software or software with potentially malicious backdoors? The pervasive nature of computing in today’s society puts a great deal of responsibility on IT professionals to maintain high ethical and quality standards and uphold the trust of the public. Professional bodies now consider all these essential competencies for computing professionals.

In this capstone course, students will gain an appreciation of the responsibilities of a computing professional and apply ethical theories and reasoning to IT industry issues such as software quality, privacy and security, intellectual property and legal obligations of IT practitioners.