It is pretty much uncommon today to find a prosperous company out there that does not use the internet in anyway shape or form. With that said, almost every employee in a particular business has access to the internet. Some people may look at this as a freedom that they are given to be able to use the internet as they please, but little do they know it is a rather large ethical issue. The issue is that of surveillance. It has been known that a lot of companies out there monitor what their employee’s do during the hours that they are schedu

led. With the use of the internet becoming more popular, more and more companies are asking themselves if they should invest to monitor what the internet is being used for during company hours.

There are many consumers out there that have received phone calls from solicitors trying to sell them something. These consumers are always wondering how they had received their home phone or cell phone. In the same survey done by informationweek.com they asked the IT and business professionals what they do with a customers private information. It was found out that not all companies take customer data, that 80% of the companies collect customer data. Out of that 80% only 60% actually inform their customers that they do not sell their private information. Where as 6% of those surveyed actually say that their company will sell the customer’s private data to a third party. The percentage jumps to 11% among those companies whose revenue is $1 billion or more. Health-care companies, collect the most sensitive customer data, and also have the highest percentage of companies for selling data.

IT professionals are being accused of just wanted to get results and not worrying too much about how they got them. "When your job is building the best-performing database you can, you don't always think about the ethical implications of how that data will be used," says Ed Altman, a former CIO at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and now director of business development at integrator and staffing firm Metro Information Services. "The very people helping to create the [data privacy] problem don't realize how bad it is,”

Some topics in this essay:
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