It certainly leads to a lot of practices whose ethical basis is very questionable at best. What seemed a relatively benign move, to track and post the books IBM employees were buying, turned ugly when Big Blue's chairman and CEO, Louis Gerstner, learned of the practice. Gerstner saw the buying circles as a gross invasion of his employees' privacy. But before he could fire off a reportedly scathing email to Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, Bezos learned of the uproar and removed IBM from the buyers' circle. Now 'cyberethics' is the new new thing.
Ethics can be a very individual thing.
Or sometimes they can be completely self-evident. One recent example again involved Amazon, but this time the company was the victim. Alibris, an Emeryville, California, online bookseller specializing in rare books, intercepted emails sent by Amazon. Alibris, which used to provide email services to some of its customers, apparently snatched the messages when its email clients happened to correspond with Amazon. At about the same time, the office supply superstore Staples found itself the target of a prank that had ethical implications.