Privacy & Data Ethics Flashcards
7 cards from real CEA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Privacy & Data Ethics flashcards as text
A company retains customer purchase data indefinitely 'just in case it is useful someday.' Which data ethics principle does this most directly violate?
Answer: Storage limitation
Storage limitation requires that personal data be kept only for as long as necessary for the stated purpose, after which it should be deleted or anonymized.
Which ethical theory most strongly supports an absolute prohibition on collecting personal data without consent, regardless of beneficial outcomes?
Answer: Deontological ethics
Deontological ethics (associated with Kant) holds that certain actions — like violating consent — are inherently wrong regardless of their consequences or benefits.
A whistleblower discloses to a journalist that their employer is secretly selling patient data to insurers. From an ethics standpoint, the whistleblower's action is best evaluated against which principle?
Answer: Prevention of harm to vulnerable individuals
Ethical whistleblowing is justified when exposing wrongdoing prevents significant harm to vulnerable third parties, outweighing the duty of organizational loyalty.
What is 'differential privacy' as a technical approach to data ethics?
Answer: Adding calibrated statistical noise to datasets so individual data points cannot be identified
Differential privacy is a mathematical technique that adds carefully calibrated noise to query outputs so that individual records cannot be inferred while aggregate patterns remain useful.
An organization's ethics policy prohibits sharing employee health data with managers. A manager pressures HR to share an employee's medical leave reason. The HR professional's ethically correct response is to:
Answer: Refuse and cite the policy and applicable privacy law protecting health information
Refusing to disclose protected health information upholds both the organization's ethics policy and legal protections such as HIPAA, regardless of internal pressure.
The concept of 'privacy as a human right' is most prominently enshrined in which foundational international document?
Answer: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 12)
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence.
A tech startup collects extensive personal data under a free service model. Users 'pay' with their data rather than money. The primary ethical critique of this model is that:
Answer: Users cannot meaningfully evaluate the true cost of surrendering their personal data
When users exchange data for services, they often lack the ability to assess the long-term value and risk of their data, making the exchange ethically problematic due to information asymmetry.