Legal and Ethical Responsibilities for Ensuring Electronic Information Security

Abstract

Nowadays, information centers have become cultural centers where everyone could gain access to information without time and place limitations. This situation has made the information centers and professionals take some new legal and ethical responsibilities. If necessary precautions are taken, this will prevent information centers from facing serious problems in terms of both fi nancial and ethical issues in near future.

In this study, both ethical and legal issues and responsibilities of information centers and professionals related to the security of electronic data resources are investigated within the scope of Turkish Law Legislation and professional ethical rules. In this process, related literature was reviewed to discover the contradictions and administrative and technical defi ciencies in terms of ethical and legal responsibilities of information centers and professionals, which in turn has resulted in new applicable solutions for this area. In addition, in scope of the current study, legal regulations related to this issue were discussed in order to propose new ethical practices which do not confl ict with the legal ones. At the end of the study, importance of raising awareness of information managers about information security and make them more knowledgeable their legal and ethical responsibilities in this subject are emphasized.