Introduction
Ethics are important for all business organizations since failing to adhere to them would lead to violations of laws that would negatively affect how organizations operate. On the other hand, laws are legal codes every human has to follow and are set to govern culture. Trentesaux et al. (2022) define ethics as moral principles, values, and standards that govern what is philosophically right and acceptable. Both ethics and law ensure that organizations maintain a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to the society where organizations are expected to produce a positive rather than negative impact. CSR is the organizational duty to society and includes acts like protecting the environment, ensuring the privacy of their customers, helping in charity events, providing employment, offering medical assistance to those in need, and building schools, among others. Both CSR and ethical business practices deal with universal moral principles. The two also deal with social behaviors and practices both internally and externally. This paper looks at a case study, demonstrates the ethical and legal issues established and breached, and offers necessary recommendations.
Analysis
The ethical and legal issue involved in this situation is the privacy and confidentiality of customers. All organizations have a corporate social responsibility to ensure the privacy of the information it holds for their customers. The breach of the confidentiality of the customers is an ethical issue since it is the responsibility of Mountain Top View’s business. After discovering the hack, the organization should have reported the same to the customers; therefore, it lacked honesty. The company on its website proclaims that it is committed to ensuring that it keeps its customer’s information safe. Nonetheless, it has broken this promise, and therefore it lacks ethics. The business has also violated the law by breaching its customer’s right to privacy. The organization could face litigations for negligence when handling its customer’s private information.
The relevant stakeholders, in this case, include the customers who may sue the organization for the incapacity to store their data safely. Government institutions could also prosecute the business for breaching government laws and regulations. The firm’s owner Clare Applewood is also a stakeholder, and she has to be responsible for her company’s actions. Steve, the company’s information lead, is also a key stakeholder since he is responsible for ensuring that the company’s database is secure and hard to hack. In case of any legal actions against Mountain Top View business, the IT lead could find himself being questioned about the security of the company’s databases. Similarly, Carlos Rodriguez is an essential stakeholder responsible for ensuring that the online operations run smoothly and is therefore entrusted with managing the IT lead. The local authorities are also participants, and their role is to ensure that the local customers are well protected hence their role is to commence litigations in case of scenarios like this.
Recommendation
The best recommendation for Ms. Clare would be to let her know that she should be open and inform all those customers who had their information hacked off the truth. In doing so, the company should be ready to apologize and promise that such events will be prevented. Moreover, the business has to be ready to notify the local government of the breach since not doing so violates the law. Governments have set rules where organizations are held liable for any unreported leakages of data, and failure to report would make it fit the case (Srinivas et al., 2019). The company believes it is its legal obligation to keep the customers’ information secure and protected, and failure to report the break would raise a moral and legal question on its part.
Steve should thank the company’s information lead for quickly fixing the breach and be encouraged to do so in the future. The lead also needs to be reminded of the company’s responsibility of transparency to the customers and other stakeholders. Some laws that the organization workers should be aware of include the 2002 California Senate Bill 1386 (2002), which requires all breaches to be reported to the customers (Murciano-Goroff, 2019). This law was the first to say breaches should be reported, and other local authorities have followed suit.
The fairness and justice framework should be used whenever a situation similar to hacking happens to a company where openness and integrity are key. Even though the situation is simple and harmless in the eyes of the IT expert and others, the company should not assume. Rather it should convey the information and let the customers decide for themselves. The test that the firm should use is doing the action violate any rights of those affected rather than the actual effects caused. The organization should also seek to update its servers, as studies show that organizations that use older software are more prone to breaches (Murciano-Goroff, 2019). Forensic and communication experts need to be also made available to help in the reporting of breaches.
Conclusion
As seen in this case, technological advances have legal and technical implications, such as data breaches. When Personal information is hacked or leaked to third parties, it may be used maliciously to achieve a certain goal. Therefore, the leaders in organizations should set up IT systems so that such hacks cannot occur. They also ensure integrity by refusing to sell their client’s data for analytics by third parties, which has become prevalent as businesses have advanced. Technological advances have challenged legal institutions to try to amend the laws with the fast-paced technological changes. Therefore, since there are no adequate laws governing how technology should be managed, firms should use ethics and ensure that their clients are well protected.
Ethical Test or Framework
All employees should use the fairness or justice approach, which originates from Aristotle. The maxim for the ethical framework is that equals should be treated equally and unequally. Employees should seek to ensure that the organization must be fair and just to its clients and must meet its goal of keeping their information secure. When faced with an ethical dilemma of whether to inform all employees about the breach or only the affected customers, the organization should choose to inform only those affected because they are not equal according to this framework.
Test or Framework
The hybrid framework for testing should be used in this case. This is so since it is a combination of modular, data-driven, and keyword driven. This type of framework combines many test approaches and therefore ensures efficiency. It is an automated one capable of improving the team’s speed and accuracy and reducing maintenance costs (Antonova & Shanovskiy, 2018). According to “Data Breach Response” (2021), the hybrid framework could analyze service providers, check the network segmentation, help forensic experts, and help with communication. Steve could have used this framework to automatically pass the information about the breach to the customers and the organization’s upper management. He could have also set the framework to automatically remind him when a breach occurred and then offer possible recommendations.
References
Antonova, A., & Shanovskiy, B. (2018). Research and analysis of the application of automated testing in web applications. Automation of Technological and Business Processes, 10(1).
Data Breach Response: A Guide for Business. (2021). Federal Trade Commission.
Murciano-Goroff, R. (2019). Do Data Breach Disclosure Laws Increase Firms’ Investment in Securing Their Digital Infrastructure? In Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (pp. 1-39).
Trentesaux, D., Caillaud, E., & Rault, R. (2022). A framework fostering the consideration of ethics during the design of industrial cyber-physical systems. In International Workshop on Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing (pp. 349-362). Springer, Cham.