IT Profession and Ethics: Importance of Online Privacy and Protection Measures

Running head: IT PROFESSION AND ETHICS
IT Profession and Ethics
Name of the Student
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Introduction:
Online privacy is one of the important factor in the current situation for ensuring safety of
the individual peoples (Baruh, Secinti & Cemalcilar, 2017). But in Australia there are several of
cases of online privacy breach in the recent time. In most of the cases it has been assessed that
peoples are totally unaware about their privacy on the online environment and this is a serious
issue which can lead to several of privacy breach related cases. In Australia recently this type of
two cases happened where online privacy of the peoples were breached. These two privacy
breaches were regarding loyalty program launched by the Coles and Woolworth where
significant amount of privacy related issues were seen. These privacy breaches were the perfect
example of issues regarding the digital privacy.
In this essay both of the identified data breach cases will be analysed briefly. This essay
will also describe the important factors of the online privacy and how this privacy can be
protected successfully in an online environment.
Digital Privacy:
Digital privacy of the individuals is very much important so that they can protect
themselves from various type of threats, but before proceeding directly to the digital privacy it is
very much important to clear the concept of the privacy (Salimian et al., 2016). Privacy is the
ability of the individuals through which they can protect their personals and confidential data
from being exposed to the public. In this aspect the digital privacy is also the same but digital
privacy defines protection of the confidential data in the online environment. The digital privacy
is very much important for protection of the digital identity of the user or any type of digital
information which are confidential in nature. Australia is one of the major country, where digital

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privacy is one of the major factor and looking at this Australian government has implemented the
Privacy Act 1988 for protecting the confidentiality of the individual users (Watts & Casanovas,
2018). This privacy act of Australia currently regulates how the Australian Government agencies
and the organization will be handling the personal information of the individual users which has
been collected by them. The Privacy Act 1988 is consisting some important principles for the
regulating these organization and Government agencies and in a collective form these principles
are known as the APP entities.
Impact of losing the Online Privacy and Threats:
Individuals must be protected from the online privacy breach related issues as this can
lead to exposure of the confidential information of them, with that it also ensures the safety of
the peoples. For the digital type of materials there can be various type of privacy issues as
privacy can be leaked easily if the digital materials are not protected properly. Privacy of the
individuals can be violated easily due to the improper protection of the digital materials (Hwang,
2015). With the individual privacy the digital materials can also violate communication privacy,
location related privacy, and the privacy regarding data and image. Due to this reason, all types
of digital materials must be protected using proper privacy so that above kind of issues can be
avoided.
In such type of cases where the online privacy of the users is not maintained there can be
several types of threats. In this cases, if the online privacy of the peoples are not protected using
proper measures then the important and confidential data of them can be easily collected from
the peoples without acknowledgement of those peoples by the ISPs of them (Bartsch & Dienlin,
2016). Some more threats can occur in this type of cases regarding the reason of online privacy
breach which are the information loss and security loss. This privacy can be protected properly if