Ethical Dilemma Description
British’s fourth largest mobile operator, T-Mobile who is under E E Phone Company faced an ethical dilemma that concerned the T-Mobile company recall matter in the year end of 2008 till 2009. The stuff in T-Mobile, United Kingdom allegedly sold customer data to brokers, who in turn sold it to other competing phone firms. These firms then started calling customers, whose contracts with T-Mobile were about to expire, trying to get them to switch to their network. (Maravis.com, 2014). When the investigators raided addresses, they found that the scam involved millions of records.
The German-owned company expressed anger that the media had been alerted to the breach when it had believed it would be kept out of the spotlight until the case came to court. "When it became apparent that contract renewal information was being passed on to third parties without our knowledge, T-Mobile alerted the ICO.” The company had been asked to keep all information on this case strictly confidential so as to avoid prejudice to the investigation and prosecution," the company added. "T-Mobile was therefore surprised at the way in which these statements were made [by the ICO]."
The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham did not at first name the operator involved, saying it could prejudice a prosecution, but added that the stolen information included names, addresses, telephone numbers and other contract details. However, after Orange, Vodafone, 3, Virgin and 02 said they were not the subject of an investigation, T- Mobile was forced to confirm its involvement (Independent.co.uk, 2014).
According to people who know, the penalties for such illegal sales are too low to teach the persons from engaging in them a lesson (Maravis.com, 2014). Thus, due to the worldwide attention, T-Mobile faced an ethical dilemma of what decision the company should make to dealing with this problems.
Why it is an ethical dilemma in a business