Data is increasingly being used in different industries making data ethics a critical issue. Customers prefer companies that handle customer information appropriately and promote data privacy in the market (Someh et al., 2019). The healthcare industry is one of the areas I have always aspired to seek employment in the future. Like other industries, the healthcare sector faces various ethical issues relating to data analytics. The main ethical issues in the industry include a lack of transparency of how data is used and data privacy.
Data collected in healthcare is crucial for experts to critically analyze various aspects such as the effectiveness of a particular drug and the prevalence of a specific illness in society. Patients and members of the public must always be aware of how their data is used, making it essential for institutions to enhance transparency (Hersh, 2014). Once the public understands how their data will be used, they can make independent decisions on whether they approve the usage or not. In most cases, data from hospitals is shared with international health organizations such as WHO to make various analyses (Dash et al., 2019). Ethical issues arise when the patients are forced to sign documents without understanding how their data is used. Besides, once the institutions collect the data from patients, they have the ethical duty of ensuring that the information is not leaked or lost.
However, increased hacking cases in society create concerns of data security and privacy which raises ethical concerns. Similar to the healthcare industry, the superstore should consider maintaining transparency and data privacy of customer data. When clients provide data to an organization, they expect the data to be used for the correct purposes (Martin, 2015). It would be unethical for the superstore, for example, to sell the private data used for analysis to another organization without the customers’ consent. Instead, the superstore should focus on using the data collected for internal analysis, such as analyzing the profits and losses accrued. However, unlike in the healthcare industry, data collected from the superstore is unlikely to be shared with third parties for analysis and instead be used within the institution.
References
Dash, S., Shakyawar, S. K., Sharma, M., & Kaushik, S. (2019). Big data in healthcare: management, analysis, and future prospects. Journal of Big Data, 6(1), 1-25.
Hersh, W. R. (2014). Healthcare data analytics. Health informatics: a practical guide for healthcare.
Martin, K. E. (2015). Ethical issues in the big data industry. MIS Quarterly Executive, 14, 2.
Someh, I., Davern, M., Breidbach, C. F., & Shanks, G. (2019). Ethical issues in big data analytics: A stakeholder perspective. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 44(1), 34.
