Numerous ethical issues arise when storing individuals’ electronic information. Four of these ethical issues include protecting personal information, protecting their financial information, search history, and keeping their information, as a whole, confidential.

Someone’s personal information contains their name, address, phone number and birthday. Depending on the website, some of them have access to the previous listed information as well as a social security number and income amount. This is vital information if someone, other than the owner, gets access to it. The hacker can use this to pretext and gain more information about that individual.

Financial information is vital. If that information is leaked by the company that holds it, or a hacker obtains this sensitive information, it could completely wipe out that person’s bank account.

The algorithm uses search history to pick and choose what you may like and follows your footprint around the internet. This is how companies can track your searches and see what you like and use this information to stalk you and target offers to you. Companies should keep this information private and not share it without your permission.

The fourth way to protect the consumer’s information is their passwords. Many websites ask if you want to save your password and login information when creating an account with them, if you are to visit and use their website on a regular basis. If the company saves their login information and password, and this file got hacked and compromised it could be potentially harmful since a lot of people use the same passwords on many websites. This means if someone were to try their email and password logins on different websites like Amazon, they might be able to access their accounts and cause a lot of damage.

In conclusion, companies need to be ethical with the personal information that they are trusted with by people on their website, so private information is not leaked and has a chance of becoming hacked.