Ethical Violation of Privacy and Property

Today in western societies more people are employed collecting, handling and distributing information than in any other occupation. Millions of computers connected to each other and sharing information. Our time is an information age and there are many unique challenges we face in this age of information. As Mason denoted, information expands and increases one’s capacity, often as the result of an input from another mind (1986). Thus, information forms an intellectual capital. However, the building of intellectual capital is vulnerable in many ways like ethical violations of privacy or property. The social contract among people in the information age must deal with these threats.

Privacy

What kind of information can be shared with others? What information should one be able to keep strictly to one's self? These are among the questions that a concern for privacy raises. Two forces threaten our privacy. One is the growth of information technology, which enables us to communicate, compute, store data and more. A second, and more dangerous threat, is the increased value of information in decision making. Especially, information is increasingly valuable to policy makers; and they gather it even if the way they do it invades another's privacy.

These invasions can be not only visible but also unobstructed, for example, when a group of diverse files relating to a person and his or her activities are integrated into a single large database. Collections of information reveal intimate details about a person and can thereby deprive the person of the opportunity to form certain professional and personal relationships. This is the ultimate cost of an invasion of privacy. Bringing together of disparate data makes the development of new informational relationships possible. These new relationships may be formed, however, without the affected parties' permission. We may have contributed information about ourselves freely to each of the separate databases, but that by itself...