Interesting, I've never seen this presented as an issue of ethics before. I think I can see your point, but I'd suggest that there's an interplay of ethical obligations between a user and the host / creator of an application in which perhaps the user should or in many cases has to accept a de-prioritised ethical consideration. For example, I would guess that a user doesn't have the right to expect an application to perform exactly to his or her expectations, regardless of what they might be. So, I wouldn't consider myself ethically obligated to work out how to accept 3gb of text from a POSTed form without truncating / modifying that text due to practical limitations of my application. (not suggesting this is a possible real-world example). But still, an interesting observation! M is for Murray On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Daniel Brown <danbrown@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Well, of course you have the _right_ to do it --- as long as it's > legal, and it's not something that *requires* the data to remain > unaltered, you have the right to do manipulate it however you want. > The question comes down to ethics and in predicting the preferences of > the user. >
