Ethics and Integrity in Business Case A W97A17 Case A: Accidental Disclosure of Confidential Information A recent graduate with bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical and computer engineering, Andrea Johnson landed a job at a mid-sized company in the consumer electronics industry. Four months into her rst assignment as a product design engineer, Andrea found herself working with a team of engineers on a new technology product. In this role, she frequently interfaced with a small hightech rm seeking to be a supplier to her company in delivering this new product. Her main contact in this high-tech rm was a young engineer named Jonah. Andrea and Jonah established a very strong and collaborative working relationship from the outset. They had frequent phone, e-mail, and instant message (IM) exchanges and, as the project progressed, began to share ever more data to achieve the project deliverables. In one of their exchanges, Jonah sent Andrea an Excel-based test report summarizing some work he was doing for her. In it, there was some very sensitive information which he inadvertently forgot to delete it contained some data about one of Andrea's company's ercest competitors, including what this competitor was doing to blunt the introduction of the technology product on which Andrea was working. Andrea's initial thought was to send the le back to Jonah and call to inform him of what he had accidentally done. But then many other thoughts crossed her mind about how she should handle this situation. What were the implications for Andrea, and for her company, if she used the information? Was it legal to use it? It didn't seem quite right to her, but she wasn't exactly sure what to do