Emerging Ethical Issues due to Technological Developments in an Era of Globalization

In an era of globalization, good business ethics leads to sustainability and long term benefits not just to shareholders and financial investors, but also to other stakeholders such as consumers, employees, competitors, government and the society at large. Globalization is not a new phenomenon, but it has been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution in the 17th century and since then the world has been constantly running towards unification of economies and removing international barriers, which in turn has led to the formation and constant amendments of new laws, policies, limits, rules, regulations and governance. Large organizations and publicly held companies typically face more scrutiny pertaining to business ethics since they utilize large portions of a region or a nation's economic resources. This is an exploratory research on some of the major ethical issues involved in ecommerce, competitive intelligence, employee privacy, software piracy and biotechnological developments. Most of these issues are being aided and accelerated by the rapid growth of modern technology. The collective effects are profound and giving rise to more complicated issues of ethics and moral conduct. Techno-ethics views technology and ethics as socially related and focuses on discovering the ethical use of technology, protecting against the misuse of technology and devising common principles to guide new advances in technological development and application to benefit society.