Agents of responsibility—freelance web developers in web applications development

Abstract

Much of the literature on responsibility in the IT field addresses the responsibilities of members of the IT profession. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the responsibilities associated with computing practitioners apply to freelance web developers. The relevant moral question is not “can freelancers be considered as professionals?”, but “are they agents of responsibility and can they cause harm”? It is obvious that they can. To justify this claim we will take the case of using free malicious code by freelance web developers and show how their actions or omissions may cause harm to the users, clients and others. We will then identify different types of responsibilities and relationships, which can be associated with freelance web developers. In the end, we will stress that, freelance web developers have higher form of responsibility and should actively seek to bring about environments in which they can function as responsible agents aiming at developing safe, secure, and workable web applications and systems.

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