Has the Meaning of “Professional Behaviour” Been Changed by Information Technology?

Professional behaviour is a very vague term. If somebody mentions it they could mean your appearance at work or even common ethics. A part of professional behaviour is defined in the code of conduct of your profession. Another is seen as common sense and not written down anywhere. Even though the term has not been defined explicitly it is still necessary to be aware of it to be acknowledged as a professional. data, since all you had to do was to lock the one existing copy into a safe or something similar and destroy outdated information.

The Data Protection Act (1998) added a legal obligation to the ethical principles already mentioned in the various codes of conduct and therefore reinforces the responsibility of the professionals. If you as a professional fail to abide this law and the personal data you processed is used by In my opinion Information Technology has somebody else you are criminally liable. strongly influenced the meaning of ”professional behaviour”. I am going to back my opinion with Secondly, there is the misuse. a few arguments and disprove the opposite using Lee (2012) Data Protection (n.d.) counter arguments. To start with there has been an increase of laws, in response to the changes in technology, to be able to deal with the new crimes.

Also even though, in past, it was enough to just carry out your profession reliably and to your best knowledge, now it isn’t. Firstly, Data protection has become very important for every company. Each company now has to ensure that they abide the Data Protection Act (1998). This means that they have to make sure that all of the personal data stored is only stored for a reason and is always kept accurate and complete. Additionally no unauthorised people are allowed to access it. (Quote: Data protection Act – Mark Lee, Bott, Original) This was not the case in past, as it was impossible to easily store and update data before the development of Information Technology. Hence there was no need for a Data Protection Act and it was not necessary for a professional to think about security.

References

Bott, F. (2005), Professional Issues in Information Technology, The British
Computer Society, Wiltshire. Data Protection (n.d.), http://www.bcu.ac.uk/health/research/ethics-and-indemnity/ethicsapplications/data-protection. Accessed: 05/01/2013. Lee, M. (2012), ‘Professional Computing module’, http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/ mgl/profcomp/lectures/. Filetype: Pdf, Accessed: 02/01/2013.