Computer Science Homework Help

Describe a database for a system that you use either professionally or personally. This could be a database that you access directly or indirectly (such as the database at a store where you shop). Identify the social and ethical issues associated with that database. Are there unique privacy concerns or intellectual property concerns associated with the database? Recommend a solution to address these concerns.

When responding to two of your peers, discuss any additional privacy concerns that may be unique to the systems, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of their recommendations. Provide additional solutions, substantiated with research or examples to support your rationale.

Peer Review #1

Marcus Hanson posted

The database that I use at my work is a system that is tracks Inventory that comes into the system and also manages all of the assets that the company owns and uses. This system also tracks the material that is needed to do maintenance and also how often the maintenance needs to be done. This system is meant to track all of the company’s assets to ensure that all of the assets stay online and can be easily and quickly maintained.

An ethical issue is that there is a lot of data that people have access to that could be an issue if it falls into the wrong hands. This could be as something as minor as someone knowing who particular vendors are that the company purchases from. This information could be used to sabotage the facility or be used to steal data about certain processes. From the standpoint of the company, this could be a point of ethical contention. The oversharing of data can also be seen as a security issue as well.

Making it so people have data that they don’t need makes it hard to keep track of any can of data leak or editing on data in the system. This can be a liability of the company and make people think that the system is reliable and/or accurate. Security is a part of the system that all users rely on and think that the developers need to take serially. If the company tries to make it so users are only allowed to access information that is needed for their job, it reduces a lot of risk for the system. The way to increase security is to reduce risk from the system.

The recommendation for the security issues and this ethical issue would be to have more strict protocols for the database user profiles. This would make it so users could only access the data that they needed to do their job. This way that data can be used can cause a lot of issues for not only the company be but for all of the entities that have their data stored in the system. This is why it is important that the system says secure and the company follows ethical practices.

Peer Review #2

Vishnu Persaud posted

Hi Everyone,

I often think about how secure my banking information is since I often interact with the banking application. Remembering a few years back one of our customers was a major bank which experienced technical issues. The impact of this was that its customers could not access their money at ATMs, and this outage impacted direct deposits. Occasionally, I wonder if hackers were behind this outage. If so, did they succeed in retrieving personal data such as social security numbers, addresses, and customer emails? Moreover, I also wonder what if my bank’s database could be compromised as well.

In addition, to security concerns, there are also ethical concerns as well. Are my spending habits being tracked? Am I being offered credit cards based on my personal data being captured? Why is the language on the financial products in very fine print and often takes a couple of reviews to understand our data?

My recommendation would be for banks to illustrate the data pipeline from a high level through infographics and explicitly allow users to opt out of various marketing campaigns.