When managing a business, confidentiality and compliance become key to developing relationship with your clientele. Whether consumers sign up for an Amazon membership or for a television company such as TalkTalk, they expect for their personal information to be protected and for the company to abide the law, and not solely care about profit. But is that always the case?
Recently, as stated in an article, the company TalkTalk Telecom Group has been fined £100,000 for not protecting their costumer’s personal data. ICO led an investigation and found that the company violated data protection laws, as an employee from an IT firm collaborating with TalkTalk easily accessed more than 21,000 costumers’ data through an online company portal.
Furthermore, this is unfortunately not the telecoms giant’s first time breaching data protection laws. In 2015, personal data of more than 150,000 customers was at risk.
After the second incident, a TalkTalk spokesman apologized saying, “We continue to take our customers’ data and privacy incredibly seriously, and while there is no evidence that any of the data was passed on to third parties, we apologise to those affected by this incident” (¶ 8).
But, is this comment enough?
TalkTalk still hasn’t confessed that these breaches of privacy were their fault. In my opinion, this has even a more negative impact on their image than the whole scandal itself. Businesses should never create justifications for escaping their commitments. Their inability to honor confidentiality towards costumers in addition to their inability to admit their mistakes makes this company much more untrustworthy.
Overall, I view the situation as a breach both of compliance to the law and of values of the business regarding their costumers. TalkTalk has an amoral management that has little consideration for ethics.
As Edward Freeman stated, “For any business to be successful , it has to create values for its customers, suppliers, employees, communities and financiers.” It seems that TalkTalk had only the interest of increasing profit, cutting down costs on wages by not hiring proper and/or enough security analysts, systems admins, and security engineers. Yet, ironically, the result of of this action, especially after their 2015 incident, nearly halved the company’s profits.
All TalkTalk’s costumers can hope for now is for TalkTalk to keep their promises of taking their privacy seriously and for a simple television subscription not to cost these costumers thousands of dollars with another cyber attack.
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