Ethics and Professional Practice Reflective Journal

This reflective journal discusses the ethics in information technology, privacy rights, legislations enacted by the Australian government to protect personal privacy, and relevant concepts and theories. It also talks about the future application of the knowledge gained.

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ETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE REFLECTIVE JOURNAL
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In the previous weeks, I have learnt about ethics in Information technology, which is a
broad topic covering various attributes which include privacy rights, various ways in which
privacy of individual persons and privacy of personal data is breached by various actors, the
various technologies that have emerged and the role that they play in either protecting or
violating personal data privacy rights. In most cases, these technologies are causing more harm
than good to personal data (Bygrave 2014).
I also learned about the various legislations that have been enacted by the Australian
government to protect personal privacy, which according to Australian Government (2018)
include; privacy and personal information protection act of 1998, surveillance devices act of
2007, health records information protection act of 2002 which states that in case of unauthorized
access to personal data, every individual whose data has been exposed should be notified within
sixty days, freedom of information act of 1998, and workplace surveillance act of 2005 which
has little restrictions on how the employers monitor their employees.
RELEVANT CONCEPTS AND THEORIES:
The most important concepts of the topic are the key privacy and anonymity issues which
are;
Data breaches: this refers to the unauthorized access to data, it may be as a result of
eavesdropping which is date leakage as a result of unsecure channel, or hacking which is
penetration into a database (Takabi, Joshi, and Ahn 2010). When a data breach occurs it exposes
private and confidential data such as bank details, business secrets, among others.
Electronic discovery: it is a technology which is used to access/ retrieve information
which is stored electronically in response to a request for production in a lawsuit (Chen and Zhao

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2012). Electronically stored information may include; E-mails, videos, softcopy documents,
websites, videos, and social media data. E-discovery uses data mining tools such as RapidMiner
to extract the required data from a large mass of data.
Consumer profiling: this refers to the use of web technologies such as cookies to keep
records of a person’s browsing history. It is mainly used by businesses to determine a customer’s
buying patterns in order to adopt predictive and customized marketing (Bygrave 2014).
Workplace monitoring: this refers to the use of electronic monitoring devices such as
closed-circuit televisions, biometric scanners and detectors, among others to monitor employees
when they are working. This has been found to be a double-edged sword since it has the benefit
of increased employee performance and the disadvantage of infringing on employees privacy
(Bygrave 2014).
Advanced surveillance technology: this involves the use of technologies such as a
parabolic microphone, radar vision, night vision, license plate recognition technology among
others, to provide surveillance (Chen and Zhao 2012).
FUTURE APPLICATION OF THE KNOWLEDGE
As an IT professional, I will use the knowledge learned to protect personal data against
privacy breach through means such as; using encryption techniques to secure data in a channel,
using firewalls to prevent unauthorized access to the organization's intranet, using unique IP
addressing techniques to restrict access to LANs and VLANs (Wang, Ren, Lou, and Li 2010). I
shall also embrace and follow the privacy rights laws that have been enacted in order to ensure
that the use of technology in my organization will not interfere with the personal privacy of the

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members of staff. In case of a data breach, I shall follow the ICT policies and guidelines to report
the incidence to the necessary agencies.

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References
Australian Government (2018). Privacy law| Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
- OAIC. [online] Oaic.gov.au. Available at: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy-law/ [Accessed 1
Aug. 2018].
Bygrave, L.A., 2014. Data privacy law: an international perspective (Vol. 63). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Chen, D. and Zhao, H., 2012, March. Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud
computing. In Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012 International
Conference on (Vol. 1, pp. 647-651). IEEE.
Takabi, H., Joshi, J.B. and Ahn, G.J., 2010. Security and privacy challenges in cloud computing
environments. IEEE Security & Privacy, (6), pp.24-31.
Wang, C., Ren, K., Lou, W. and Li, J., 2010. Toward publicly auditable secure cloud data
storage services. IEEE network, 24(4).