BUSINESS ETHICS
Introduction
(Tuzovic, 2019) In the news article, has raised the concerns of the insurance companies’ practices in Australia due to the application of the fitness trackers by consumers. The recent trend shows that there’s an increase in the use of fitness trackers (Fitbit) in Australia and insurance companies have taken advantage of this situation by giving discounts to consumers that share their Fitbit data with them for research purposes to improve their business model. The concerns raised are data protection, unfair price discrimination, privacy and use of the consumers’ data by the insurance companies. Tuzovic has also shown that there might be a shift from voluntary participation to share data for discounts to mandatory participation of consumers which would lead to unethical practices of the insurance companies. The article also shares steps to reduce risks of backlash from consumers if they feel that there are unethical violations made by the insurance companies.
Ethical & Legal Issues
The Corporate Ethics issues raised in the article are mainly concerned with the privacy of the consumers of the insurance companies. Companies can use the data of consumers in numerous ways and in the complexity of business issues, transparency by the companies is key to success in earning the consumer’s trust and expansion of the business. According to (Goodpaster, 1991), ethical issues arise when the stakeholders are not considered in the decision-making process and a responsible decision-making process involves an ethical relationship with the stakeholder i.e the consumers. (James G. Hodge, et al., 1999) Legal health information laws include acknowledging recognizable health information as extremely sensitive, offering privacy protection based on appropriate information procedures, encouraging patients with information and approval to disclosure, restricting transparency of non-consent health records, integrating business-wide safety regulations, the establishment of a domestic data security agency and the establishment of a reasonable level domestic level of security of privacy. The conflict between collecting the healthcare data and its usage can be solved by assurance or a federal statue to use the health records only for certain purposes (Gostin, 1997). The ethical concerns of the information are highly sensitive as they contain personal information, demographics, financial...