Data Ethics and Privacy: Ethical Considerations and Solutions

This report delves into the critical aspects of data ethics and privacy, examining the ethical implications of employee monitoring, particularly concerning access to pornography and the potential for termination. It proposes analytical solutions to mitigate ethical and privacy issues, emphasizing the importance of clear organizational guidelines and continuous monitoring. The report further explores ethical considerations in data classification within a hospital setting, highlighting the use of attributes like weight, marital status, and chronic illness in decision-making, with a focus on decision tree and random forest classification models. It also addresses measures hospitals can take to protect patient data, including risk assessments and employee education. Finally, the report investigates privacy and security breaches, referencing the Acxiom corporation, and discusses methods to enhance security and privacy, as well as the government's role in accessing private data and determining organizational needs for data access.

Data ethics and privacy

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
1.1 Is it ethical for organisations to monitor employees to detect access to pornography..........3
and then sack them if they have accessed it? Discuss................................................................3
1.2 Analytical solution that can avoid the ethical and privacy issues while helping the
organization to achieve what they wish to...................................................................................3
2.1 Assessing various attributes of the individuals is ethical for the business............................4
2.2 Attributes to be considered in particular classification model...............................................4
2.3 Classification model...............................................................................................................4
2.4 Measures taken by hospital to protect the patients' data from being used unethically.........7
3.1 How to increase security and privacy....................................................................................7
3.2 How government can have access to private data. ...............................................................8
3.3 Determining what an organization must need to access to private data................................8
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
Data ethics is mainly associated with the collection, storming and use of personal
information of an individual. It is mainly concerned with doing the right thing for protecting the
personal data and information. This study will highlight on monitoring employees and
determining ethical and privacy issues. It will also highlight on classifying ethics and various
models to attain goals and outcomes of the hospital. It will also help in determining privacy and
security breaches of the consumer data.
MAIN BODY
1. Prevention better than litigation
1.1 Is it ethical for organisations to monitor employees to detect access to pornography
and then sack them if they have accessed it? Discuss.
Organizational ethics define the value of an organization to its employees and also inform
them about the rights and wrongs for a business (Mai, 2016). It is basically concerned with the
set of principles and value that govern the actions and decisions of employees. In the view point
of author, it is ethical for the organization and the top level management to monitor the
activities of employees in the company so that the problems can be detected and corrective
actions can be taken accordingly. Almost 72% of the companies in the UK have to deal with the
problem of misuse of internet in the company which has affected the overall productivity of the
company. Furthermore, Ray Stenton, director of securities at Unisys stated that the employees
were caught sending explicit E-mail around the organization with 127 MB of porn attached and
that further led to the crash of E-mail servers. Therefore, it is imperative for the top level
management to monitor these unethical and illegal activities and then take a strict action like
suspension or direct termination (Bender and et.al., 2017).
1.2 Analytical solution that can avoid the ethical and privacy issues while helping the
organization to achieve what they wish to.
The top most priority of every company is to protect the privacy and to preserve the ethics of
their organization so that the employees can work with maximum productivity and also it will
help in building the brand image of the business (Asher and et.al., 2018). The potential solution
to avoid such problems is to block such websites and links from the internet but according to
Mr, May, blocking such websites and pages is not a permanent solution instead the organization
must mention clear guidelines that employees should follow and ignorance or negligence of

these policies will lead to termination and also legal action will be taken against them. Also, the
company must continuously monitor the actions of the employees and it must be clearly
mentioned in the contract. However, there are some laws relating to the breach of privacy of
employees as per the European commission therefore the company needs to restore the laws and
mention their own act precisely and clearly to avoid further confusion and conflict (Floridi and
Taddeo, 2016).
2. Ethical classification
2.1 Assessing various attributes of the individuals is ethical for the business.
Hospital must focus on determining various attributes such as weight, marital status,
gender and chronic illness of the individual in an ethical and reasonable manner helps in
improving the operational efficiency of the business. This information is very crucial for the
management and health care practitioners in the hospital. Every individual present in the
organization focuses on taking into consideration all the attributes as it is useful in ethical
functioning of the organization (Herschel and Miori, 2017). Taking into consideration all these
attributes helps in improving various health outcomes of the individual. This also helps in better
decision making in ethical and efficient manner and in turn also leads to better health outcomes
of an individual.
2.2 Attributes to be considered in particular classification model.
Decision tree classifier model is one of the most important tool used for data mining. This
model ins useful in breaking various data sets into smaller fragments or subsets. Attributes
considered in the particular data set mainly includes weight, marital status and chronic illness in
order to gain wider perspective on the subject matter. In case the age of the individual is up to 65
and if the individual is single then they are at low risk (Pedreschi, 2017, July). On the contrary if
the individual is married and they weigh above 65 then they are at higher risk of chronic disease.
In case of chronic illness, if the individual is taking home care then they are lower risk as
compared to the patients who are not taking any care. Therefore, all these are the major attributes
play a key role as it helps health care practitioners in better decision making and data mining.
2.3 Classification model
Random forest classifier can be used as a potential model to achieve hospital's desired outcomes.
The model creates a set of decision trees from randomly selected subset of training set and it

further aggregates the votes from different decision trees to decide the final class of test object
(Harmanci, and et.al., 2018).
It involves a large number of relatively uncorrelated models operating as a committee that can
outperform any of the individual constituent models. There are certain pre requisites like:
 Need of an actual signal in the features so that the models can perform better as compared
to random guessing.
 Also, the forecasting made by the individual trees must have low correlations with each
other.
RANDOM FOREST CLASSIFIER
It is concerned with large number of ensemble trees that operate as an ensemble where every tree
gives a prediction and the most voted class becomes the model's prediction.

2.4 Measures taken by hospital to protect the patients' data from being used unethically.
It is essential for a hospital to have a clear record about their patient's data in order to have an
accurate information about their personal details, problems and the potential solutions. It also
helps in making various arrangements related to the number of doctors to be required for an
operation, medicines and bed occupancy (De Lusignan and et.al., 2016). The hospital can take
various measures to protect the patients' data like
 The hospital company must conduct a risk assessment of their computers and other IT
systems to identify the potential threats like virus, hacking and phishing and then any
unethical activity like hacking or phishing the third party must not be able to understand
it.
 The health care associated and the employees who have access to the websites must be
held accountable in case of any breach of information as it would help in making
employees more cautious and aware which would ultimately lead to avoidance of such
problems.
 The hospitals must also spread awareness regarding the consequences of data breaching
and how lawsuits from patients can affect the brand image of the company. It is important
to educate employees as it makes them more aware about the situation and so that they
can be more careful.
3. Privacy and security breach
3.1 How to increase security and privacy.
As per the case study analysis Acxiom corporation is required to increase security and
privacy of its customers data. Company is use credit card and another facilities for work
complete. Here is company have to follow data protection act in order to secure data and
transactions of customers on the online payment modes. This is help to protect data and
information of customers in effective manner (Safa, Von Solms and Furnell, 2016). With the
help of data protection act company manager is able to make effective security for business and
on credit cards payments. Manager of Acxiom have to use better and advance technology for its
workplace in proper manner. They can use proper technology for payment and consumers
protection at workplace for attracting those towards company.

3.2 How government can have access to private data.
As per the case study and own research government have to access to private sector data
because every company have right to gain proper consumer protection in respective manner. This
is created more suitability for business and its growth factors (Sen, 2015). The consumer
protection is most important part of the company either it is governmental and private sector.
This creates more suitability for business. This is very important and effective for business and
its growth factors which are important for Acxiom corporation. Government has to consider data
protection act in private sector data. The data had been important for company and customer
protection. A computer system administrator at a data marketing company, had stolen the
personal data of millions of people which is creates more effective thinks for business process
and growth factors (Sicari and et.al., 2015). In respect to customers security government have to
be considers with private sector data in proper manner for better work consideration in respective
manner.
3.3 Determining what an organization must need to access to private data.
The organization must focus on complying with various infringement laws, data privacy
and security laws, rules and regulations in order to protect all the information in an ethical and
sustainable manner. The company must integrate with information security system which helps
organization in keeping all the information private (O’Leary, 2019). Non- disclosure of private
information also results in keeping all the data safe and secure.
CONCLUSION
From the above conducted study, it has been summarized that data ethics is mainly
associated with doing the right thing for protecting the personal data and information. This helps
in determining ethical practice associated with pornography, hospitality and privacy nad security
of breach at Acxiom.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Asher, A and et.al., 2018. Ethics in Research Use of Library Patron Data: Glossary and
Explainer.
Bender, J.L and et.al., 2017. Ethics and privacy implications of using the internet and social
media to recruit participants for health research: A privacy-by-design framework for
online recruitment. Journal of Medical Internet Research.19(4). p.e104.
De Lusignan, S and et.al., 2016. Using routinely collected health data for surveillance, quality
improvement and research: Framework and key questions to assess ethics, privacy and
data access. J Innov Health Inform.22(4). pp.426-432.
Floridi, L. and Taddeo, M., 2016. What is data ethics?.
Harmanci, A and et.al., 2018. When Biology Gets Personal: Hidden Challenges of Privacy and
Ethics in Biological Big Data.
Herschel, R. and Miori, V.M., 2017. Ethics & big data. Technology in Society. 49.pp.31-36.
Mai, J.E., 2016. Big data privacy: The datafication of personal information. The Information
Society. 32(3). pp.192-199.
O’Leary, D.E., 2019. Big Data Privacy, Ethics, and Enterprise Continuous Monitoring
Systems. Next-Generation Ethics: Engineering a Better Society, p.129.
Pedreschi, D., 2017, July. Social network analytics, data science ethics & privacy-preserving
analytics. In 1st Europe Summer School: Data Science (p. 5). ACM.
Safa, N. S., Von Solms, R. and Furnell, S., 2016. Information security policy compliance model
in organizations. computers & security. 56. pp.70-82.
Sen, J., 2015. Security and privacy issues in cloud computing. In Cloud Technology: Concepts,
Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 1585-1630). IGI Global.
Sicari, S. and et.al., 2015. Security, privacy and trust in Internet of Things: The road ahead.
Computer networks. 76. pp.146-164.
Online
Decision Tree Classification in Python. 2018. [ONLINE]. Available
through:<https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/decision-tree-classification-
python>