Big Data Privacy, Ethics and Enterprise Continuous Monitoring Systems

Abstract

There is a delicate balance associated with ethics and privacy in “enterprise continuous monitoring systems.” On the one hand, it can be critical to enterprises to continuously monitor the ethical behavior of different agents, and thus, facilitate enterprise risk management (with respect to such agents engaged by or with the enterprise as noted in the above quote). In particular, continuous monitoring systems help firms monitor related internal and external agents to make sure that the agents hired by or engaged by the enterprise are behaving ethically. However, on the other hand, such continuous monitoring systems can pose ethical and privacy risks to those being monitored and provide risks and costs to the company doing the monitoring. Information obtained by continuous monitoring generally should follow privacy principles that require that the data be up-to-date and conform to the purpose for which the data was originally gathered and other constraints.

Keywords: Privacy, Ethics, Continuous Monitoring Systems, Big Data, Analytics, Enterprise Continuous Monitoring Systems, Text Analysis, Continuous Auditing

JEL Classification: y, z