Describe four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals.
The first issue that arises when storing electronic information about individuals is data usage. Many companies today openly admit to using user’s stored data. This works by having a company store your data, this company then provides this data to other parties to create more personalized experiences. For example, if you use Google to look up an item, you will later see an ad about that exact item when your using a different party. Now even though this does bring convenience and personalization, a user does not know much about the data being stored. How much data, exactly what data, and where this data is going to are all concerns about data usage today.
The second issue is data selling and it ties directly into data usage. Data selling is essentially what is happening when you get those extremely personalized ads online. A company will store an individual’s information and sell it to a third party. This brings revenue for the company that sells it, but also allows the third party to create these personalized ads that are more likely to get an individual to spend money because of the ad. This means that your personal information is not only being stored without your knowledge but is being sold and passed around from company to company.
The third ethical issue is what happens during data deletion because is it really deleted? There are some good companies that do indeed delete your data, but there’s also a lot that don’t. For example, an individual could go through all the steps of deleting data and even get a confirmation that it has been deleted, just to be tricked and not actually delete the data. Without investigating and making sure that you have deleted data, it is hard not to think that you did indeed delete your data. This actually happened to me. I subscribed to a streaming website and later tried to delete me account and information. I went through all the steps and clicked ‘delete’ at the end. After a month went by, I was still charged again. I went to the website and there it was, my account was still active, and the company was still charging me every month.
The last ethical issue I’d like to talk about is how an individual would have no idea that a company that stores your personal data had a breach. An attacker could steal information that includes your data from a company and use it for nefarious purposes, and you would not know unless the company notified you. Even extremely personal information such as your name or address can be taken.