Y2k Ethical Dilemmas

Unauthorized surveillance is a violation of privacy. Corporations insist that the use of video monitoring is strictly documented for legal purposes. What many companies fail to do is give handouts that clearly inform their employees and customers that such methods are being practiced and most don't even attempt to inform them. Some retail stores place security cameras in dressing rooms, monitor emails and even inspect online activity. Upon learning of these procedures, employees may feel violated, and customers may become nervous and uncomfortable. Word of these tactics can spread and prove detrimental to the organization. To avoid this,

It is known that systems have been created that monitor the activity of every citizen

Surveillance is not a new thing. In fact, espionage, tracking, and sleuthing were part of society ever since 5000 B.C. But in the rise of the modern era, the idea of surveillance in the public eye serves as a controversial topic of discussion. People everywhere complain about the existence of security cameras, government tracking, and the right to privacy. Such problems, however, are not due to the sudden discovery of surveillance, but the modern abuse of it. Seeing the disastrous effects of over surveillance from George Orwell’s 1984, the public rightfully fears societal deterioration through modern surveillance abuse portrayed in Matthew Hutson’s “Even Bugs Will Be Bugged” and the effects of such in Jennifer Golbeck’s “All Eyes On You”. The abuse of surveillance induces the fear of discovery through the invasion of privacy, and ensures the omnipresence of one’s past that haunt future endeavors, to ultimately obstruct human development and the progress of society overall.

In the world today, smartphones are becoming the “norm”, with basic phones becoming nearly obsolete in recent years. Pairing the overwhelming presence of social media with the rise in usage of smartphones brings to light an entirely new set of problems and challenges regarding patient privacy. According to a 2010 study conducted regarding various boards of nursing, 67% of executive officers surveyed reported receiving complaints about nurses misusing social media (Spector & Kappel,

Government surveillance is beneficial in moderation, but can quite easily become excessive. A well-known example of this is the controversy regarding the NSA monitoring U.S. citizens discreetly on American soil. This unwarranted watch crosses the fine line between monitoring criminal suspects for security, and blatant overreach of authority in spying common citizens. The personal infringement of information has been commonly associated with the NSA’s PRISM, but their MUSCULAR program is much more disconcerting. According to Harry Bruinius in “Why Tech Giants Are Now Uniting Against U.S. Surveillance”:

In his Modern Healthcare article, “HIPPA Hurdles”, author Joe Carlson exclaims his concern for the new rules set in HIPPA that will be put into place this month. HIPPA is a set of measures, and laws, that healthcare provider’s take to ensure they are “safeguarding” patient’s health information (Carlson 2013). Carlson is speaking up for most healthcare providers when he describes his distaste for these new provisions in the Omnibus HIPPA Final Rule. The main issue in these provisions states that providers will have to “Honor requests from patients to withhold sensitive records from insurance companies if the bills are paid out of pocket.” (Carlson 2013). He asserts that the reason this will become an issue is because no one has the technology to simply safeguard one hospital or doctor visit from insurers, and that their own technological programs compile everything together and make this request difficult. While this new rule may be helping out patients, it will be causing more hardships and possible punishments when the healthcare providers forget or are not able to do as the patient asks. By grabbing his audience’s attention through appealing to our logic and emotions, Carlson does succeed in informing us about these new concerns.

In Brian Trent’s article, Technology and Tomorrow: A Challenge to Liberty, Trent describes how electronic surveillance has increased and how it will continue to spread amongst people. In Craig Silverman’s article, Smile, Big Brother’s watching, Silverman explains that the amount of time and surveillance that corporations conduct over employees is increasing, but having some negative effects. Both of these articles explain how electronic surveillance will increase so much, that almost everyone will be able to be seen when not in the open [monitored]. In this essay I’ll be going more in depth to describe both articles and I’ll explain whether I agree with their arguments and why.

Do you ever feel like you're being watched? Today the government abuses its power but tracking every mile Americans drive. The article, Big Brother Is Watching You Run Errands connects directly

Government surveillance in the past was not a big threat due to the limitations on technology; however, in the current day, it has become an immense power for the government. Taylor, author of a book on Electronic Surveillance supports, "A generation ago, when records were tucked away on paper in manila folders, there was some assurance that such information wouldn 't be spread everywhere. Now, however, our life stories are available at the push of a button" (Taylor 111). With more and more Americans logging into social media cites and using text-messaging devices, the more providers of metadata the government has. In her journal “The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit”, Anita L. Allen, an expert on privacy law, writes, “Contemporary technologies of data collection make secret, privacy invading surveillance easy and nearly irresistible. For every technology of confidential personal communication…there are one or more counter-technologies of eavesdropping” (Allen 1). Being in the middle of the Digital Age, we have to be much more careful of the kinds of information we put in our digital devices.

Myranda Aguilar is a privacy analyst for Sutter Health in Sacramento, California. The purpose of the program is to protect patients’ privacy, compliance, and information security. Her responsibilities are to monitor and investigate any suspicious activity by taking a proactive standpoint against hackers, educating hospital staff, and ensuring patients safety during their stay in the hospital. One of the projects that she is currently working on is privacy auditing and monitoring by tracking patients records to determine if there has been any inappropriate activity by any of the workers, if so she is obligated to report the incident. They use a quarterly metric system to track the negative and positive attempts on a patients’ chart. Some of

Ball, K.S.(2001). Surveillance Society: Monitoring everyday life. Information Technology & People, 14(4), 414-419. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/222415193?accountid=32521

In the article “That’s No My Phone. That’s My Tracker”, Peter Maass, suggest in a seemingly, unbiased fashion, that unconsciously we are letting ourselves be tracked and investigated by simply using our cell phones, “Every year, private companies spend millions of dollars developing new services that track, store and share the words, movements and even the thoughts of their

How would someone act differently if they knew they were being watched all the time? There would be an abundance of distrust, paranoia, and antagonism – all directed towards the perpetuator of the surveillance. It is almost comparable to life under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. In that novel, the people of Oceania were always monitored by microphones or telescreens (a sort of two-way camera) for any signs of malcontent towards the authority. Like-wise, in the current reality, the whistleblower, Edward Snowden, revealed private governmental documents that showed the U.S. federal government using widespread surveillance in order to gather all types of electronic intelligence from its citizens for information. He showed that, “for more

(Taitsman, Grimm & Agrawal 2013): In a series of compliance audits undertaken by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services, government auditors sitting in hospital parking lots with simple laptop computers could obtain patient information from unsecured hospital wireless networks. (p. 978)

This gives organizations information that the user may not aware is being recorded and shared. Without knowing it, we are leaving “ electronic fingerprints” with every mouse click, every phone call, is recorded and used for analysis purposes, which tend to be justified through the idea that it is used to help protect civilians from terrorist or other threats. Though surveillance is used to protect society, it can go as far as to even control and monitor society. In countries like China, the government uses surveillance to censor what is available to the public, and therefore allows the leaders of the country to maintain a tighter grip on society.