Describe four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals.
Four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals are privacy, security, accuracy, and access.
Privacy is one of the most important factors in protecting individuals electronic information. People don’t want information that is important exposed to others such as hackers. Sensitive information including financial information, information from cookies and personally identifiable information that can be used to identify people may be included in personal data that is maintained electronically. This data must be stored with the proper safeguards to protect the individual’s privacy. If the individual has their information compromised then privacy rights can be violated. This also damages the integrity of things.
Security is important when dealing with offensive hackers trying to break valuable information or disrupt important systems. Keeping electronic data may leave it open to security loopholes. Personal data theft or illegal activity related to sensitive data are potential outcomes of cyberattacks, data inflitration, and hacking events. When businesses don’t offer sufficient security measures to stop such accidents, which exposes personal data, an ethical problem occurs. For example when a big company such as target suffered a data breach and thousands of customer information was retrieved from hackers which caused ethical issues seeing how big the company is.
Using accuracy while storing data about people is important. Accuracy presents another ethical problem. Errors or inaccuracies that affect personal data might have serious backlash. Inaccurate information may result in legal action, or even lead to a misdiagnosis of a medical condition. That is why it’s crucial to guarantee the accuracy of any electronic storage of personal information for individuals.
Because electronic data can be accessed from anywhere in the world, ethical questions about who should have access to the data are brought to attention. Personal information should only be accessible to those who have the authority to access that specific information such as your doctor accessing your medical files, or background information. Privacy violations and other ethical problems may arise from unauthorized access to personal data. Thats why Access control is important because we need to ensure ethical standards in electronic data storage.