Describe four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals.

Four issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals are an inappropriate use of data, security breaches, data inaccuracies, and discrimination. In the first issue, companies often use collected users’ data in an attempt to profit off of their users using a method called algorithmic profiling. Whether it be selling this data to third parties for online ads or collecting information to sell their own product better, this method is unethical and certainly an invasion of the average consumer’s privacy. This is an issue that most people worry about in our current age of technology. especially since hackers are getting smarter and companies’ cybersecurity practices are getting laxer, which leads to more companies experiencing data breaches. Another ethical issue is security breaches, which are often caused by hackers but because they usually store a lot of sensitive information about individuals. When these hacks happen, they can leak people’s personal information leaving them vulnerable. Multiple companies have had data breaches like this in the past year, such as Microsoft, Fifth Third Bank, Health Share of Oregon, and T-Mobile. In the past month, Apple has had a use security breach where it experienced three zero-day attacks that exploited their data storing app. This lead to vulnerability in multiple user accounts, which apple waited to tell consumers. The third ethical issue is data inaccuracies. This is an issue because of the number of sheer data companies take in. This leads to a company collects leads to data inaccuracies or loss in their data. Finally, the last issue that leads to an ethical debate is discrimination. Data algorithms collect user’s data to determine race, sex, and ethnicity, leading to discrimination of individual users. Google has been accused of discrimination when it comes to job search for some female users. An algorithm is only as good as the data it collects.