Ethical Dilemma in Web Design: Case Study Analysis & Resolution

This case study examines an ethical dilemma faced by James, a consultant contracted by a web design company to assess employee skills for training purposes. James encounters a situation where the senior Vice President requests confidential information about individual employee performance, conflicting with the agreement to keep this data private. The analysis applies the ACS code of ethics and Thomas White's ethical framework to determine the appropriate course of action. James should prioritize honesty and the quality of life of the employees by refusing to disclose individual results and instead providing a general report focused on overall training needs, thereby upholding professional conduct and ethical standards. This approach ensures that the data is used solely for its intended purpose of improving organizational capabilities without compromising individual privacy or creating potential for misuse of sensitive information.

Running Head: Code of Ethics 0
Code of Ethics
Report
Student name

Code of Ethics 1
ACS code of Ethics
I select the case study 3 based on analyses and discussion. In this case, study, James had
contracted by a web design consultancy. They are contraction James to conduct an interview of
their staff to ascertain their web development knowledge. James has a task to identify individual
weaknesses for implementation of training courses.
He had a good knowledge to identify overall weakness. Therefore, company can implement
training courses for their employees. James has faced the ethical dilemma, when senior Vice
President of the company asked ‘who did well in this study’. However, it is already decided that
all the data is to remain private. Therefore, he cannot share that confidential information with
anyone. That information has collected for only new training course implementation. In addition,
James could advice about the training courses.
According (Meyenn, 2000), private data cannot share for any personal reason; it can be used to
provide overall help to people in a same way. James cannot share that private information, as it
is so sensitive for those employees.
Based on the Thomas While theory, James should use ACS code of ethics to secure private
information of employees because anyone can misuse that information for their persona
benefits. It is not a professionalism to share that information with Vice President.
In this case, James should maintain Honesty. As he has assigned a task to take interviews and
make a record of weakness of individuals. Therefore, it is the responsibility of James to secure
that information. It can affect the quality of life of all those employees, which are part of that
interview process. Here, James uses the enhancement of quality of life code of ethics for
securing that data (teaching.csse.uwa.edu.au, 2019).
Vice President is not having any right to ask anything about the private information of all
employees. It can affect the performance of the employees. The main objective of this interview
process is to implement the training course. It was conduct for betterment of the organization.
Therefore, James could not share that sensitive data with senior Vice President of the company.
James should follow the ACS code of ethics and ACS code of professional conduct to secure
that information from vice president. It is in favor of code of professional conduct. In addition,
James must say no to the vice president about the interview process and their result.
Professional ethics should be present in the decision of a person (Burmeister, 2017).
James only provides a report about the training courses, which has based on the weaknesses
of employees. He should say that ‘all are very good and there are few things to improve though
training courses’. A person takes their decision based on the code of ethics (Thomas, et al.,
2018).
Codes of ethics are helpful to take a right decision in that type of dilemma (Al-Saggaf, et al.,
2017). Professionalism is a skill, which makes a person better and ethical to take decision with
the help of ethics. It is a matter of honesty and professionalism (McDermid, 2015). Thus, James
must take a proper decision and give a simple answer to vice president.

Code of Ethics 2
References
Al-Saggaf, Y., Burmeister, O. K. & Schwartz, M., 2017. Qualifications and ethics education: the
views of ICT professionals. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, p. 21.
Burmeister, O. K., 2017. Professional ethics in the information age. Journal of Information,
Communication and Ethics in Society, 15(4), pp. 348-356.
McDermid, D., 2015. Ethics in ICT: an Australian perspective. 2nd ed. Australia : Pearson
Higher Education AU..
Meyenn, A., 2000. A proposed methodology for the teaching of information technology ethics in
schools. s.l., Australian Computer Society, Inc, pp. 67-72.
teaching.csse.uwa.edu.au, 2019. Australian Computer Society Code of Ethics. [Online]
Available at: http://teaching.csse.uwa.edu.au/units/CITS3200/ethics/acs-ethics.htm
[Accessed 12 March 2019].
Thomas, G., Burmeister, O. & Low, G., 2018. Issues of Implied Trust in Ethical Hacking. ORBIT
Journal, 2(1).