As more users join the online atmosphere, their
personal data is at the whims of the company whose services they employ. Or at
least, that’s where most users who deign to care might think their personal
data is. There are 4 ethical issues in regard to storing electronic information
about individuals. In this discussion, they are data collection, data storage,
data privacy, and the protection of data.

The way data is collected might surprise you as
there are some not-so-obvious methods of data collection you may not readily
have thought about. Things such as traffic cameras take pictures of our cars
and license plates when we run red lights and there are security cameras in
just about every public space. These examples we may write off as we easily
justify their use. The security cameras keep the public safe and give context
clues to crimes no one was around to see and while paying the ticket is the
last thing anyone would want; traffic cameras act as a deterrent and make our
roads safer. These methods of data collection are known and mostly accepted.

However, facial recognition software is a less
known technology. Pictures from this software have been used to train AI facial
recognition tools which store this data in large databases. Access to the
databases was sold to law enforcement agencies so a police officer could upload
an image of a face to this database and identify matches in the collected
storage. All of this happening unbeknownst to the hundreds of thousands of people
whose personal data was housed in storage.

This example is clearly a major violation of user privacy
and an example of a company using user data without their informed consent. In
keeping with concerns of privacy and protection, user data can be anonymized so
that group data only shows as an average. The goal should always be to protect
an individual identity. But companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their
shareholders and that influence has been enough to require government intervention
and enforcement.