To The 5 Situations Below

1. Read and respond to the 5 situations below, describing what you would recommend given each situation, and using at least one of the ethical frameworks or theories discussed in Ch. 12 for each scenario. Submit your answers in a Word document.

Situation 1
The help desk is part of the group assigned to Doug Smith, the manager of office automation. The help desk has produced very low quality work for the past several months. Smith has access to the passwords for each of the help desk members’ computer accounts. He instructs the help desk supervisor to go into each hard drive after hours and obtain a sample document to check for quality control for each pool member.

Situation 2
Kate Essex is the supervisor of the customer service representative group for Enovelty.com, a manufacturer of novelty items. This group spends its workday answering calls, and sometimes placing calls, to customers to assist in solving a variety of issues about orders previously placed with the company. The company has a rule that personal phone calls are only allowed during breaks. Essex is assigned to monitor each representative on the phone for 15 minutes a day, as part of her regular job tasks. The representatives are aware that Essex will be monitoring them, and customers are immediately informed when they begin their calls. Essex begins to monitor James Olsen, and finds that he is on a personal call regarding his sick child. Olsen is not on break.

Situation 3
Jane Mark was the newest hire in the IS group at We_Sell_More.com, a business on the Internet. The company takes in $30 million in revenue quarterly from Web business. Jane reports to Sam Brady, the VP of IS. Jane is assigned to a project to build a new capability into the company Web page that facilitates linking products ordered with future offerings of the company. After weeks of analysis, Jane concluded that the best way to incorporate that capability is to buy a software package from a small start-up company in Silicon Valley, California. She convinces Brady of her decision and is authorized to lease the software. The vendor e-mails Jane the software in a ZIP file and instructs her on how to install it.

At the initial installation, Jane is asked to acknowledge and electronically sign the license agreement. The installed system does not ask Jane if she wants to make a backup copy of the software on diskettes, so as a precaution, Jane takes it on herself and copies the ZIP files sent to her onto a set of floppies. She stores these floppies in her desk drawer. A year later the vendor is bought by another company, and the software is removed from the marketplace. The new owner believes this software will provide them with a competitive advantage they want to reserve for themselves. The new vendor terminates all lease agreements and revokes all licenses on their expiration. But Jane still has the floppies she made as backup.

Situation 4
SpectorSoft markets eBlaster as a way to keep track of what your spouse or children are doing online. Operating in stealth mode, eBlaster tracks every single keystroke entered into a computer, from instant messages to passwords. It also records every e-mail sent and received and every Web site visited by the unsuspecting computer user. The data is sent anonymously to an IP address of the person who installed eBlaster. eBlaster could also be installed onto a business’s computers.

Situation 5
In March 2012 Google Inc. started combining nearly all the information it has on its users. That is, it can combine all the information from a user’s activity on Gmail. Google+ or YouTube to influence those users’ search results and to better alert them to things that might be of interest to them. That way it can compete better against companies such as Facebook. The move to combine data with information from Internet searches represents a departure from Google’s previous privacy policy. In June, 2011, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, “Google will remain a place where you can do anonymous searches. We’re very committed to having you have control over the information we have about you. So, for example, if you want to continue to use Google and don’t log in, and don’t tell us who you are, that will continue to be true forever.” Mr. Schmidt’s statement may be true for people who aren’t logged into a Gmail, Google+, YouTube, Android phone or any other Google account. But for all other users of Google products, it will be hard for users to maintain their anonymity.

“Google now watches consumers practically everywhere they go on the Web—and in real life, when using a mobile phone,” said Christopher Soghoian, an independent privacy and security researcher. “No single entity should be trusted with this much sensitive data.”