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 Attentive: Set the Context

1. Ethical Actor

   The first step is to identify the ethical actor. In a sentence identify the ethical actor for this problem.
   
   

2. Stakeholders

   The next step is to identify the stakeholders. List the other stakeholders for this problem.
   
   

3. Assumptions

   In two or three bullet points, identify any assumptions you are making about the problem.
   
   

Answer 1

Context: This is in the context of ethical business operations and data privacy for using the unauthorised data for self-interest.

Ethical Actor: The person who has acquired the data in good faith from the customer should act as the ethical actor and should not use or share the data for undue commercial benefits without the knowledge and permissions of people and customer who had shared the data.

Stakeholders:

There are the following stakeholders:

1. Myself as the owner of the database of customers, it is my ethical responsibility as not to share the information for any unauthorised purpose.
2. My friend as he is the middle agency between the companies that are using the data and the source of data.
3. Companies that are using such customers data for their own benefit and interest without having permission from these people to use their contacts.

Assumptions:

The only assumption, in this case, I am making that the company which is using the database for marketing purpose are aware of the fact that these are unauthorised data and there is no consent from customers.