SHOULD PATRICIA DUNN HAVE BEEN FORCED TO RESIGN?

Should Patricia Dunn have been forced to resign?

Should Patricia Dunn have been forced to resign?

Patricia Dunn was on the hunt for a leak within HP. As Chairman of the Board she took on the responsibility of finding the person who was leaking the information. While conducting her investigation she made several moral decisions that raise questions about her ethics and values. She is considered to be the mastermind behind the pretexting allegations which violated the privacy of HP's Directors and various Journalists (Kaplan, 2006). Since then, she has been forced to resign and many people are questioning if she should have been. By examining the utilitarian and deontological ethical considerations of her actions, the answer becomes evident. Patricia Dunn should have been forced to resign because she made unethical moral decisions and broke the law which ultimately led to damaging HP's reputation.

When Dunn was put in a position to protect HP and find the person leaking the information she was unsuccessful. She then became so outraged that she was forced to hire an outside firm (Kaplan, 2006). The firm engaged in pretexting, in which they lied in order to obtain personal information about Directors and outside Journalists (Rasch, 2006). Dunn, if not aware of the tactics used by the firm, became aware shortly after and eagerly attempted to use the evidence found against the accused person (Kaplan, 2006). This is just as bad as instigating pretexting.

Well, I guess that depends on if you think pretexting is morally acceptable. What is pretexting? Well, until this week I had never even heard of it. I had heard of scams that are considered to be pretexting, but I never knew that was the official term. In this case, pretexting is when a person or person's masquerades as another to obtain private information such as phone records. Not only did they masquerade as another person, they actually used the last four digits of the subjects' social security number.

I think that Ms. Dunn had good intensions on doing what she thought was the right thing to do; as a matter of fact I would say she thought it was her duty. When Hewlett-Packard (HP) hired an investigation company to try to track down the board leak, she should have looked a lot more into how the investigation company was going to handle the investigation. The fact that there was a leak does not give her the right to start looking into personal telephone records. She does, however, have every right to know what is going on in the company itself. I just think that there were different avenues of approach that she could've gone down.

When a company wants to look into the acts of their employees, I don't really think that they should be able to go through email and company phone records unless they have probable cause. Every employee has a right to privacy. The only way that they may have given up this right is ...