Company C requires you to report violations of the organization’s code of conduct to an ethics hotline or your manager. In the code of conduct, it states that anything confidential must be kept confidential and not doing so violates the code of conduct. One morning, you overhear two colleagues discussing confidential information at a table at a donuts shop. Do you have an ethical responsibility to report it? Why or why not?

Code of conduct to an ethics hotline\manager

Consider the following hypothetical scenarios:

Company C requires you to report violations of the organization’s code of conduct to an ethics hotline or your manager. In the code of conduct, it states that anything confidential must be kept confidential and not doing so violates the code of conduct. One morning, you overhear two colleagues discussing confidential information at a table at a donuts shop. Do you have an ethical responsibility to report it? Why or why not?

You’re at the same donuts shop on another morning, and you overhear two doctors discussing a patient. They reveal the patient’s full name and that the patient just had a liver transplant. It bothers you to hear this, as you consider how you would feel if it were you being discussed in public under those circumstances.

Do you have an ethical responsibility to report it? Why or why not?