1. Describe four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals.
- Privacy Concerns: one of the things with the highest perceived value in our country is personal privacy, people generally hate the idea of their personal information being at risk, therefore security measures that prevent breaches of privacy are of the utmost importance.
- Data Breaches: To go right along with the privacy concerns we just mentioned the possibility of data breaches is a huge ethical concern, mainly because a data breach is always possible and therefore should companies or agencies be storing electronic information about individuals knowing that the data is always going to be at risk of a data breach?
- Misuse of Data: This will always be the general populations greatest concern, and it should be, trusting a company or an agency with personal information is a big leap of faith, which puts an exceptionally large ethical responsibility on the people being entrusted with the information to not misuse the information in any way.
- Data Retention: These practices come with a large ethical responsibility, companies but be extremely transparent about how long and for what purpose any personal information is going to be stored for.
2. Compare cybersecurity risks in the U.S. and another country.
The U.S. boasts a highly developed digital infrastructure, including extensive use of cloud services, IoT devices, and interconnected networks, which increases the attack surface for cyber threats in relation to other countries, most of which do not possess anywhere near the size and scope of cyber framework that we do, making us a much larger target no doubt, but also making us a much harder target, as out security framework is like our digital infrastructure, much larger than most other countries. Another thing that sets us apart from most other nations is out cyber security regulations, most notably things like the NIST framework, having these types of frameworks allows us to better protect critical infrastructure and our citizens personal data better than a lot of other nations can and do.