Question

(TCOs D, G) Patrick is an employee of the USD Corporation, a manufacturer of educational software and presentation materials. USD’s policy is to not seek patents (because of the enormous cost) but rather to take all steps necessary to ensure that trade secrets are preserved. Patrick signs a nondisclosure statement and most of the materials that he works with are marked top secret, not for public disclosure, and so on. Patrick gets fired and vindictively sets up a website detailing what he has worked on for USD and disclosing innovative company initiatives and plans for the near and distant future. You are an executive with a competing company. You inadvertently see the site while browsing the Web one evening. This information will destroy USD and could catapult your company into the industry lead.
i. What are your legal options, and what course of action would you recommend?
ii. What should you ethically do? Describe the actions you would take.

Answer 1

Since what Patrick did is not supposed to be happen and incase Patrick disclose the valuable data, it would be huge loss to the company and that was not supposed to be happened. Now in order to stop the further disclosure of the valuable information, the company can file a law suit against Patrick and asking him not to disclose any other information about the company's website. Secondly, whatever the loopholes the website has, I will try to fix those loopholes such that the website doesn't remain vulnerable.

The only course of action that can be done as a part of ethical procedure is to include data protection training program within the organisation such that employees are aware of the fact that data leakage is very much illegal. Secondly, drills can be performed to aware the employees about the fact how to protect the data from outside world.