Introduction Pretexting is a criminal offence of infringing the privacy of a person or a company through impersonation to obtain private information for personal interests. Usually, pretexters mislead their victims to disclose sensitive and private information with the intention of using the information for maligning or impersonation. Since companies have private information that they do not want to share with media and other companies, they are prone to pretexting. For example, the chairperson of Hewlett-Packards (HP), Patricia Dunn, could not understand how information from her company was leaking to the media. According to Kaplan (2006), Patricia Dunn became angry when she realized that some members of the board had been leaking information to the media. Consequently, she planned to conduct an investigation to establish the identity of the involved perpetrators (p.40). When Mark Hurd joined HP as the chief executive director, Patricia Dunn felt uneasy, and she consequently schemed to investigate his director’s records and interactions with other companies, including the media, to establish the source of the leakage, which seemed to threaten the privacy of HP. Thus, since pretexting is a criminal offence, this essay argues from the utilitarian and deontological perspectives that, HP management should have forced Patricia Dunn to resign. Utilitarian Perspective According to ethical theory of utilitarianism, one should only act to promote pleasure and minimize pain to the greatest number of people. In essence, an action is ethical if its consequences generate greatest benefits to many people. Thus, in the case of pretexting, Patricia Dunn was after selfish interests of maligning board of directors. Being angered by the continued leakage of information from HP, Patricia Dunn plotted to spy phone records and emails of the board members to establish the identity of people who leaked sensitive information of HP to the media. According to Kaplan (2006), Patricia Dunn confessed that Hp had been spying its members of the board since 2005 after having personal conflict with Tom Perkins (p.40). Hence, from the utilitarian perspective, Patricia Dunn wanted to achieve personal interests by spying how the board of directors interacted with other companies and media. Therefore, spying on the directors had no benefits to the board, except Patricia Dunn who wanted to malign the board members; therefore, the HP management should have compelled her to resign because she pursued personal interests at the expense of members’ privacy. Patricia Dunn has been concentrating on management and regulatory issues that HP is facing since she wanted to create a board driven by process and not personality. Given that the problem, which the board experienced, was leakage of sensitive information, Patricia Dunn thought the best way to curb it was through pretexting. From the utilitarian perspective, management and regulatory issues that Patricia Dunn was grappling with had no significant importance to board or HP. Arrival of new chief executive direction, Mark Hurd made Patricia Dunn feel uneasy since she wanted more powers to control not only the board, but also the whole company. Kaplan (2006) argues that, Patrician Dunn concentrated on pointing inconsistencies