Choicepoint and Sony, an Ethical Analysis Essay Example for Free

Choicepoint and Sony, an Ethical abridgment Essay moral philosophy refers to what comes off as right or wrong to an unmarrieds conscience .The internet period has brought ab come to the fore new ethical issues, not all for an individual barely for the society as rise as it has eased anonymous manipulation and distribution of information, creating new and easier paths for committing crimes like piracy, identity theft, infringement of an individuals privacy etc. In this paper we will be analyzing the Choice-point case and the Sony data recrudesce case from an ethical point of view. (Laudon Laudon, 2010, p.128)BackgroundThe ChoicePoint info breach On September 27 of 2004, ChoicePoint,a fraternity that aggregates and stores personal information, suspected that some of its small disdain customers were involved in suspicious activities and informed the police. (Paine, Phillips, 2008)On February of 2005, ChoicePoint solitary(prenominal) notified those residents of Californi a whose data had been leaked to the illegal customers, since a certain law in California requires it. A avow from the public, however, forced the follow to notify the details of the breach to the other involved parties residing in the other states. The swindlers who scammed ChoicePoint had created over 50 tales with previously stolen identities over the course of a year or even longer. (Pantesco, 2006)Look muchthe issues concerning identity theft essayChanges in business practices (Otto, Anton Baumer, 2007) ChoicePoint made numerous changes after the 2004-2005 data breach. The high society closed the 50 fake accounts and made a policy to refuse every faxed business licenses in the future .The Company formed a new policy, that all nongovernmental organizations rent to be re-credentialed in recite to do business with it, and increased its procedures in verifying the identity of the company. More stringent and better business policies in ensuring the safety of their customers data, for e.g. partial masking of social security numbers were employed. The company continued its investigations of its databases for further indications of foul play and brought in outsiders to assess and rectify their practices. The Sony Data BreachThe Sony data breach was a result of an intrusion from an outsider party, ca employ an outage in the PlayStation Network and Qriocitys serve between 17th April 2011 and 19th April, 2011.A confirmation from Sony revealed that pieces of personal information had been stolen from each and every 77 trillion accounts. This breach resulted in Sony shutting off the PlayStation Network for 23 days. (Hirai, 2011)Sony stated that the chairman of the company had submitted explanations treasured by United States House subcommittee regarding the attack and that they were taking some measures to prevent further breaches. When questi unitaryd about the chequer in making the breach public, Sony explained that theyd sought help from outside official s to conduct an investigation in order to comprehend the nature and magnitude of the incident and hence forensic analysis and investigation had caused the quell since they wanted to have all the necessary details before making the breach public. On whitethorn 14, 2011, Sony released a security patch called PlayStation 3 firmwargon version 3.61 requiring users to change their word upon signing into their account in the PlayStation Network. (Seybold, 2011)Compensation In compensation for this outage, Sony announced hosting of special events for their users. Sony wanted to appreciate the loyalty of the customers who stuck to using Play Station network and didnt look for other alternatives. and so Sony announced an extension of palliate 30 days of its various services for its existing users. Also, few of their games in the PlayStation network were made slack, though these games are available only in some regions or countries. In addition to that Sony also offered one years worth o f free identity theft protection to all of its customers. (Wesley, 2011)Ethical Analysis concord to Culnan and Williams (2009, p.679),the two aspects of morality that are principal to the relationship between information aggregators and information providers are vulnerability and avoiding harm.Aspect of VulnerabilityAnalysis Since the customer gives away his data in exchange for something in return, he loses control on how that information would be used in the future.(Culnan Williams, 2009, p. 681) The firm that is aggregating the data has the responsibility to exercise caution in protecting the consumers vulnerability, not only for the sake of the customer but also to build its own reputation.However, in the cases of twain ChoicePoint and Sony breach, the consumers were vulnerable. Individuals whose data ChoicePoint and Sony stored lacked knowledge about the risks posed by Choice Points credentialing procedures or the way personal information was stored by Sony.Aspect of Do No HarmAnalysis Most ethicists are of the opinion that data aggregators have the minimum job of doing no harm whenever there is an issue concerning information privacy rights (DeGeorge 2006 Goodpaster 1987 Marcoux 2003 Valesquez 2003 as cited in Culnan Williams, 2009), even more than so when their treatment of the consumers sensitive personal information makes the consumers unnecessarily vulnerable. (Culnan Williams, 2009, p. 682)In both the cases of ChoicePoint and Sony Data breach however, the DO NO Harm principle was violated and moral responsibility was clearly transfer in the behavior of the officials of these firms. (Culnan Williams, 2009, p. 682)ChoicePoints questionable intentions in delaying the notification of the breach to the public and the fact that ChoicePoint only bothered to search records that were leaked within 15 months to the naming of the search ,until pressurized, were criticized heavily.( Evers, 2005)Further investigations revealed that ChoicePoint had been s ubjected to a similar scam in 2002.( Paine, Phillips, 2008)The fact that ChoicePoint could be duped so easily within two years proved that ChoicePoint hadnt through anything to improve its practices since the last breach. Similarly, Sony also had a delay in notifying the users of PlayStation network about the breach. The public contest Sonys reason for its delay by speculating that, if Sony judged the situation to be so grave that it felt the need to shut down its PlayStation network, then they should have warned the public without any delay as sanitary.Moreover, Sony failed to give any concrete reports regarding the breach and merely stated that they cannot rule out the opening move of a username or password leak. One more thing to be noted is that the fiends could have possibly gotten information like email addresses and first names of the customers who had consented to receiving information about new deals or products from Sony or its partners.Now, there is a middling good c hance that the fiends might send emails in the format of a Sony webpage template and extract worth(predicate) information from those customers. Hence this breach indirectly paved the way for more unintentional breaches in the future. (Eddy, 2011)According to, (Laudon Laudon, 2010,p.135),the basic Concepts of ethics are as followsResponsibility where the individual or the organization should accept the duties, cost and obligations for the decisions that it made. Accountability where the organization should be aware of what decision is taken by whom. If it is impossible to find out who was responsible for what action then that organization is basically incapable of ethical analysis. Liability this basically extends the image of responsibility to legal actions where the affected individuals should be able to get compensation for their damages.Analysis In my opinion, both ChoicePoint and Sony showed half-hearted ethics on these incidents as a whole. While Choicepoint did inform offic ials about the breach as in short as it found out, yet it only felt necessary to inform the public because of the California law. The populate in the other states were notified because of public outcry. Also limiting the search results for leaked records to only 15 months prior to the date of the search just because it was necessary by the law was another mistake on ChoicePoints part. then ChoicePoint violated the ethical concepts of responsibility and accountability yet they seemed to have understood their mistake when they were making changes in their policies and practices after the 2004-2005 breach, and were willing to take corrective actions. But it is debatable whether ChoicePoints corrective measures were taken to save its own business or whether it genuinely cared for the affected individuals. Similarly, though Sony did do necessary investigations, it failed to concretely differentiate which parties had been affected or what kind of information have been stolen.Similar to ChoicePoint, there was a delay in notifying the public regarding the breach. Hence, there is a dearth of responsibility and accountability from Sonys side as well .The compensations given can similarly be argued to be a ploy for keeping itself in the market. While, ChoicePoint and Sony offered free credit monitoring and free identity theft protection respectively for one year, they disregarded the possibility that the thieves might lie low and take advantage of the stolen information after the passage of a year. Hence these companies showed half-heartedness in being ethically liable as well.