Tobacco Firm Violates Research Ethics to Seek Confidential Data
Philip Morris, the American tobacco company that produces popular brand names of cigarettes such as Marlboro, Players and Virginia Slims has had their moral standards called in to question by various international media outlets. The company was found to have forcefully extracted information from a University of Stirling study examining the effect cigarette marketing has on teenagers as young as thirteen years of age. The information that Philip Morris acquired contained over six thousand confidential interviews with teenagers concerning their attitudes about tobacco use.
Although executives from Philip Morris maintain that they were well within their legal rights to access the information (citing Freedom of Information laws to win their case in courts), critics are calling their decision to pursue the information unethical, as the subjects polled and interviewed in the study were not made aware that the data could be accessed by outside parties. The main ethical issue with this case is that by forcing University of Stirling to give up confidential data in courts, Philip Morris is making the researchers betray the confidences of the thousands of study participants in the study in order to gain a competitive advantage for their firm.
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