Question

One day you run into a friend from college, who is operating a direct mail company which is in the business of gathering and selling names for marketing ventures. Her company has no privacy policy and she does not provide an opportunity for people to “opt-in” or “opt-out” of the marketing lists. You have a database of contacts based on your own sales efforts. She offers you the opportunity to share databases – for each name you submit to her marketing database, you will receive $100. Your database currently has 6,000 names from people who have asked you for information about the product and to whom you have made presentations. Many of the people in the database are your current customers.

Please complete each section of this worksheet. Some people find that writing the answers out on another page and then "cutting and pasting" them into the worksheet lets you think through the problem better.

If you only have time to do part of this worksheet, click the "save work" button at the bottom of this page. At any later time, you can then return to this worksheet and continue.

Be Intelligent: Identify the Issue and the Values in Tension

1. Issue

   In one sentence, identify the issue for this problem.
   
   
   

2. Values in Tension

   In three or four bullet points, identify the values in tension.

Answer 1

Issue= Is it ethical to use the details of the customers for business purposes without taking their permission?

value in tension= Value in tension indicates that the rules and ethical norms adopted by the firm are creating problem for the code of ethics. Value of tension are stated below=

The company does not have any privacy policy for customer details.

The company is selling the details of the customer to other firms without taking permission from the customers

Is it ethical to use the personal information of the customers and selling it for the monetary benefits?