PII And Ethics Research Paper
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PII is an abbreviation that stands for Personal Identifiable Information as used in information security. This is information that can be used to identify, contact or locate a single person. Ethics are the standards set in place in order to distinguish right from wrong. As important as PII is in the modern information technology, it has its advantage, disadvantage and ethical issues. PII comes in handy in modern technology. The most commonly used information to identify individuals are ID and drivers numbers, social security numbers, vehicles registration number, date of birth, biometrics, facial recognition to name a few. If PII did not exist, it would be incredibly hard to narrow down and individual since many people share names. There are some advantages that tie in with PII when it comes to the purpose of distinguishing individual identity. Big corporations find PII important identifying their employees. For example most companies have employee ID which is unique from one employee to another. Government officials need to use PII to search and identify and distinguish individuals in their large data base. For example, all legal US residences have a social security number that identifies an individual. In forensic, PII is important to help track down and identify criminals. This identity can be obtained through facial recognition and finger prints resulting in a selective revelation of one’s identity. Finger prints are unique with each individual. As there are advantages to PII, there are disadvantages as well. Almost everyone is technologically savvy and tend to use the internet for their everyday life. For example, it is very convenient to shop, bank online, study, access medical records search and apply for jobs in order to have access to all this different sites, one has to give out personal information details on the internet. While all this sounds very convenient, there are criminals out there who are waiting for you to upload your personal information and their job is to retrieve it and exploit it. These individuals are called identity thieves. The biggest crime in the world now is identity theft. Identity theft is whereby criminals take over someone else identity and assumes it. Identity thieves exploit individuals’ information by accessing their financial, medical and other sensitive personal information. It is very easy nowadays to have your identity stolen. In recent reports, there has been tones of account takeover, whereby criminals are going into banks and assuming someone else identity and withdrawing money from this accounts. Medical records can be used to exploit an individual by selling it to vendors or blackmailing someone if there is sensitive information on their record. In my opinion, there are not strict laws that govern internet privacy abuse. Apart from the advantages and the disadvantages, there are ethical issues facing personal identifiable information. It seems to me that criminals cannot distinguish what is wrong and what is right. Technology has been abused to full capacity in recent years. Hackers have found loop holes around the internet and are using it to harass innocent victims. Ethics is not valued when it comes to technology because most people who create programs are the same people who turn around and abuse it. For example, most people who create anti-virus programs are the same people who go back and create virus, Trojan horses, worms to name a few. As a result, these individuals are making money all year round while pretending to protect your internet privacy while in real sense; they are the ones causing all the trouble. Another ethical issue is that most sites gather and individual personal information and end up storing it and sharing it with third parties for their own benefits. The effective sharing of this information while protecting the private information is a real challenge. Social networking has resulted in some user publicizing wrong information under false names. This to me is not ethical if someone is going to disguise his/her identity under false pretense. The government needs to set more strict laws that have the maximum penalty with the issue regarding internet privacy. The tradeoff would be to define the demarcating lines between what is public and what is private. Internet privacy is indeed important in case of the revelation of personally identifiable information but it requires being limited in cases where privacy puts the internet ethics at stake. All said and done the world we are living in today depends on technology almost in every aspect of life and the internet need to be protected.

Work cited from www.buzzle.com updated 9/23/2011