In the era of smart wearable technologies, many corporate companies focus on corporate wellness programs, measuring the performance of employees, and tracking employees data and activities in the workplace. However, the use of wearable technologies in the workplace poses a strong legal and ethical challenge for the organisation. One of the major concerns is leaking the secret information of a company to a third party or its competitor without user consent. Wearable devices can store large amounts of information and it can be used by the employee to manipulate the works and policies of the organisation.
This creates ethical issues regarding privacy and security of confidential data of the company and also breaches the law of informed consent (Ching & Singh, 2016). The second major challenge is that some companies do not disclose their manufacturing process or their formula of manufacturing goods, but a person can easily capture the whole work process and sell it to its competitors (Martini, 2014). It means there is nothing like privacy or copyrights because people will theft the confidential information/formula without the consent of the actual user.
Identification of ethical issues
Most of the companies use prefer to use wearable’s in the organisation to track their employees and their movements. Especially in a healthcare organisation, it is used to track the patients’ health improvements and to track their rehabilitation process. In corporate organisations, wearables are used to track the movement of employees (Jhajharia, Pal, & Verma, 2014). The two important ethical issues related to wearables are as follow:
Analysis
Most of the organisations use the wearable technology devices to facilitate their employees to directly communicate with other department and with their boss. However, it does not only impact the privacy concern of the organisation rather if any confidential data leak in the outside of the organisation then it will be dangerous for the organisation. Wearable devices create problems when it is used by wrong intentions (Solangi, Solangi, Chandio, bin Hamzah, & Shah, 2018). If we talk about mining and gas industries then it plays a crucial role in safety because these industries involve are the high-risk role.
Nowadays data-breaches are the normal ethical issues that are happened on frequent basis. This can be possible through a smart wearable device (Gao, Li, & Luo, 2015). Actually, some people believe that it is an invasive surveillance tool rather than a smart communication device that can also improve the performance and productivity of employees. Generally, wearable devices are efficient to leak the information about both employees and employers. Thus, privacy is the most ethical issue related to wearables. With the introduction of wearable technology a new threat that each device has the capability of storing large amounts of data but do not capable in encrypting or secure the information with password or any user authentication codes.
Evaluate and Justify
Using wearable technology devices helps the company to collect the data and has many benefits but it does not come without any negative implications. Although, in last few years most of the organisations using wearable devices within the organisation to track the movement of their works and improve their performance, but it also increases the danger of data insecurity and privacy concern (Thierer, 2015). The biggest issue of using wearable devices in the workplace is to privacy concern of both organisations and of employees as well.
The unethical issue is related to collecting data without the consent of the employer and sell it to the third party or competitors. Some research found that it improves the performance of employees if it is executed well and monitored by a surveillance system (Yano, Akitomi, Ara, Watanabe, Tsuji, Sato, & Moriwaki, 2015). Instead of this, incidents of data breach increases day by day. Thus, an organisation should only permit those wearables that do not create dangers for the organisation and not able to capture any information (Kritzler, Bäckman, Tenfält, & Michahelles).
More than 45 million of the devices sold in 2017-18 and over 3 million to be included employee wellness by 2019. Employers will see many benefits with this revolutions but using these devices are bringing some dangers as well (Awolusi, Marks, & Hallowell, 2018). Thus, before allowing wearables within the organisations, the top management should research all the implications before bringing such change in the workplace. Working closely with the human resource department it should be considered that privacy of information is the valuable aspects with using the recent technologies. If there are no benefits of using such wearables in the organisations, then it should be avoided.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it has been concluded that if technology has some benefits then it has some negative impacts as well. Thus, it totally depends on the organisation to decide whether a wearable device is something that is beneficial for the organisation or it can create problems for the organisation. Before using the wearable devices, it is important to analyse its pros and cons before introducing in the workplace.
References
Awolusi, I., Marks, E., & Hallowell, M. (2018). Wearable technology for personalized construction safety monitoring and trending: Review of applicable devices. Automation in Construction, 85, 96-106.
Ching, K. W., & Singh, M. M. (2016). Wearable technology devices security and privacy vulnerability analysis. Int. J. Netw. Secur. Appl, 8(3), 19-30.
Gao, Y., Li, H., & Luo, Y. (2015). An empirical study of wearable technology acceptance in healthcare. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 115(9), 1704-1723.
Jhajharia, S., Pal, S. K., & Verma, S. (2014). Wearable computing and its application. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, 5(4), 5700-5704.
Kritzler, M., Bäckman, M., Tenfält, A., & Michahelles, F. (2015). Wearable technology as a solution for workplace safety. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (pp. 213-217). ACM.
Martini, P. (2014). A secure approach to wearable technology. Network Security, 2014(10), 15-17.
Solangi, Z. A., Solangi, Y. A., Chandio, S., bin Hamzah, M. S., & Shah, A. (2018). The future of data privacy and security concerns in Internet of Things. In Innovative Research and Development (ICIRD), 2018 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Thierer, A. D. (2015). The internet of things and wearable technology: Addressing privacy and security concerns without derailing innovation.
Yano, K., Akitomi, T., Ara, K., Watanabe, J., Tsuji, S., Sato, N., & Moriwaki, N. (2015). Measuring Happiness Using Wearable Technology. Hitachi Review, 64(8), 97-104.
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