Three Distinct Perspectives of Applied Ethics in IT: A Case Study of Facebook Data Breach

This document analyses the Facebook data breach incident using three distinct perspectives of applied ethics: professional, philosophical, and sociological. It discusses the importance of professional ethics, philosophical ethics, and sociological ethics in the IT industry.

Topic in IT ethics
Three Distinct Perspectives of Applied Ethics
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Topic in IT ethics
Introduction
The principal purpose of this document is to focus on a recent significant ethical dilemma
related to Information and Communication Technology. Nowadays Facebook is considered to be
the foremost emerging social platform for a business purpose since it has specifications such as
wall posts, sharing information, remarks, and private posts and so on which offer a huge space
for a number of diverse text-based communications to take place (Gull et al., 2014). The incident
chosen for this topic is the famous data breach of Facebook in April 2018 where more than
270000 people all around the world were affected by a major data breach. The incident is
critically reviewed and analysed using the three distinct perspectives of applied ethics such as
the professional, philosophical and the sociological ethics (Adams, Clark & Craven, 2018).
1. Professional Ethics Perspectives
Professional ethics perspective is defined as the type of perspective which accepts standards
of personal and business behaviour, values and guiding principles. The professional ethics are
recognized by the ICT organizations to help guide employers in executing their work functions
according to complete and consistent ethical values (Crane & Matten, 2016).
Professional ethics cannot be only about enduring by the guidelines, but continuous awareness
to the needs of the client and situations. The development in ICT over the years has increased
the existence of large volumes of data. Managing this data is turning out to be a huge task for
the ICT management teams (Patrignani, & Whitehouse, 2014). It can be seen that the offenders
can access important data which can lead to monetary loss to the owners of the organisation.
Using organization information systems such as posting inappropriate content on social media
using a company account can lead to lawsuits and loss of business. In one of the major recent
ethical dilemma is the data leak in Facebook in April 2018. About 270000 people downloaded a
personal quiz application and shared information about themselves and their friends with a
researcher who passed the data to the Cambridge Analytica which is against the professional
ethics followed by Facebook authorities (Shah, 2018). After that incident, the Facebook
authorities made an announcement that they will post about the unethical use of personal
information. This incident hampered the professional morals of the organisation and put their
security on a question. The professional ethics which organizations like Facebook follow such as
code of conduct, reliability, transparency and honour towards the job, confidentiality and
objectivity is highly hampered by that data breach incident. The ethical professionals of
Facebook Corporation made decisions after the breach incident so they implemented better
guidelines of ethics that are helpful to an understanding of their behaviour of its users. The
importance of professional ethics of every organisation in Information and Communication
Technology is directly related to the protection of the data of its employees and clients. The
professional ethics which includes the personal and corporate standard of behaviour is very
essential for all the ICT Corporations for the safety, sincerity, acknowledgment for long-terms
business purposes (Thunman & Persson, 2018).
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2. Philosophical Ethics Perspectives
In this section of the document, the philosophical ethics of the major data breach in a major
social media like Facebook is discussed and analysed. The philosophical ethics of the corporate
organisation aims to deal with systemising, defending and recommending concepts of right or
wrong (Carella & Monachesi, 2018). In order to sustain in the business world, every organisation
need to follow certain principles through which they are able to understand the value of those
widespread data over the internet. Managing this huge data over the internet are turning out to
be a challenging task for the ICT management teams. In recent years the philosophical ethical
aspects play a progressively significant role in Information and Communication Technology
industries. Many accidents like the exposures by WikiLeaks and Facebook data breach are the
important reasons for reconsidering the way of use ICT companies (Halder, 2014). Fresh
developments need to be done towards assimilating human values in design measures. The
privacy and security should be measured sensibly in the initial phases, the human values should
be considered in a broader sense and it must be addressed in such a way so that it increases the
adequacy and worth of new ICT systems. Every social media user values their privacy and the
security of their personal life and also in their social media activities (Malthouse et al., 2013).
They certainly do not want their private data to be accessible to just anybody at any period so it
is the responsibility of the Facebook authorities to provide security to its users. So after that
incident, Facebook incorporated few specifications such as users can view in the settings to see
what application have admission to their information, Facebook featured a module in the
newsfeed so that its users can easily check the permitted apps. The increasing control of new
technology by external threats and the deteriorating clearness and contract on confidentiality
give rise to difficulties about law and ethics and these ethical dilemmas significantly affect
productions of every industry so every organisation needs an expertise to deal with ethical
dilemmas in the utilization of technologies (Hassan, Mingers & Stahl, 2018). So there is a need of
good ICT policy which must be able to adequately reflect the protection of individual privacy,
protection of academic information, user accountability and use of information.
3. Sociological Perspectives
There are many aspects of an ethics perspective in case of any phenomenon such as
normative ethics, meta-ethics, applied ethics and descriptive ethics. The normative ethics
implies the ethical ways which every person should follow to maintain ethical balance in any
work environment on the other hand meta-ethics describes the actual ethical theories related to
ethical implications behind a behavioural action of an individual. This section of the document
will be highlighting the sociological ethics of a major data breach in April 2018. Sociological
ethics is what is good for a personal as well as for the society and it also establishes the nature of
responsibilities that people owe themselves to one another. Human beings have the ability to
judge the morals such as good or bad and right or wrong. ICT provided efficient and well
organised means of data storage and data retrieval but at the same time suffers from piracy of
copyrighted resources and data piracy (Lin et al., 2018). Sociological ethical issues are rising from
the wide-spread use of ICT are of growing anxiety. Examples include the boundaries of privacy in
social media network sites, ownership and control of information by search providers and the
illegitimate data mining of as many as 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica is
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raised new anxieties about the safety of private data stored on Facebook. Every society is
dependent on mutual expectations about what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour
among its members so the investigation has to include descriptions of those ethical beliefs and
practices. With the extensive use of different platforms for different kinds of purposes, there is a
need for data privacy because of the ubiquity of the technology-driven and information-
intensive situation. Technology-driven and information-intensive commercial operations are
typical of the new ICT companies. The importance of using them is that the market place are not
limited and does not depend upon any time zones or geographical locations, business are far
more transparent, customers are better knowledgeable and employment practices are more fair
than the primitive days. There is urgency in maintaining the sociological ethics to maintain the
integrity of the profession, conduct of the employers, welfare of subjects and customers in order
to avoid social issues such as identity stealing, information warfare, phishing scams, cyber
terrorism and extortion. Every organisation needs to reflect the following ethical challenges
related to ICT such as acknowledgment for individual and business ethics associated with ICT, a
prominent equilibrium between ethical and technological issues, rational property privileges
issues, non-violation of privacy and related rights within the organisation, permissible difficulties
and restrictions and professional responsibilities. The self‐regulatory guidelines in Facebook
should be more secured as it is one of the most used social media all over the world and people
of all ages are using it for different types of purposes so for making decisions and defining
professions the ethical codes have to be developed and implemented by experienced
professionals in every ICT company for outlining the mission and vision of the organization. It
should be guiding every employee about how to approach difficulties, the ethical moralities
established in the organization's core ethics (Floridi, 2013).
4. References
Adams, B., Clark, A., & Craven, J. (2018). It is Free and Always Will Be-Trading Personal Information
and Privacy for the Convenience of Online Services. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.08491.
Carella, V., & Monachesi, P. (2018). Greener through grey? Boosting sustainable development
through a philosophical and social media analysis of ageing. Sustainability, 10(2), 499.
Crane, A., & Matten, D. (2016). Business ethics: Managing corporate citizenship and sustainability in
the age of globalization. Oxford University Press.
Floridi, L. (2013). The ethics of information. Oxford University Press.
Gull, K. C., Angadi, A. B., Seema, C. G., & Kanakaraddi, S. G. (2014, February). A clustering technique
to rise up the marketing tactics by looking out the key users taking Facebook as a case study.
In Advance Computing Conference (IACC), 2014 IEEE International (pp. 579-585). IEEE.
Halder, B. (2014). Evolution of crowdsourcing: potential data protection, privacy and security
concerns under the new media age. Revista Democracia Digital e Governo Eletrônico, 1(10),
377-393.
Hassan, N. R., Mingers, J., & Stahl, B. (2018). Philosophy and information systems: where are we and
where should we go?.
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Topic in IT ethics
Lin, X., Featherman, M., Brooks, S. L., & Hajli, N. (2018). Exploring Gender Differences in Online
Consumer Purchase Decision Making: An Online Product Presentation
Perspective. Information Systems Frontiers, 1-15.
Malthouse, E. C., Haenlein, M., Skiera, B., Wege, E., & Zhang, M. (2013). Managing customer
relationships in the social media era: Introducing the social CRM house. Journal of
Interactive Marketing, 27(4), 270-280.
Patrignani, N., & Whitehouse, D. (2014, July). Slow Tech: the bridge between computer ethics and
business ethics. In IFIP International Conference on Human Choice and Computers(pp. 92-
106). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Shah, S. (2018). Facebook suffers another massive data breach that exposed the details of 120
million users. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/6654504/facebook-quiz-app-data-leak-
cambridge-analytica-scandal/
Thunman, E., & Persson, M. (2018). Ethical dilemmas on social media: Swedish secondary teachers’
boundary management on Facebook. Teacher Development, 22(2), 175-190.
Do not remove the following marking sheet.
Marking Sheet
Criteria Standards
Mark
s
awar
ded
Use professional,
philosophical,
and
sociological/desc
riptive ethics
perspectives to
analyse the
ethical issues
involved in the
case.
(Value 70%)
HD: Comprehensive understanding of the professional,
philosophical, and sociological/descriptive ethics perspectives
through in-depth discussion and analysis of three most relevant
ethical issues involved in your chosen case. (59.5-70)
DI: Mostly comprehensive understanding of the professional,
philosophical, and sociological/descriptive ethics perspectives
through in-depth discussion and analysis of three most relevant
ethical issues involved in your chosen case. (52.5-58.8)
CR: Some understanding of the professional, philosophical, and
sociological/descriptive ethics perspectives through some
discussion and analysis of two relevant ethical issues involved in
your chosen case. (45.5-51.8)
PS: Basic understanding of the professional, philosophical, and
sociological/descriptive ethics perspectives through some
discussion and analysis of two relevant ethical issues involved in
your chosen case. (35-44.8)
FL: Major omissions in understanding of the professional,
philosophical, and sociological/descriptive ethics perspectives and
irrelevant ethical issues are identified and analysed. (0-34.3)
Writing &
structure
(Value 20%)
HD: Language features and structures are used to convey meaning
effectively, concisely, unambiguously, and in a tone appropriate to
the audience and purpose with no spelling, grammatical, or
punctuation errors. (17-20)
DI: Well developed skills in expression & presentation of ideas.
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Fluent writing style appropriate to assessment task/document
type. Grammar & spelling accurate. (15-16.8)
CR: Good skills in expression & clear presentation of ideas. Mostly
fluent writing style appropriate to assessment task/document type.
Grammar & spelling contains a few minor errors. (13-14.8)
PS: The text contains frequent errors in spelling, grammar, word
choice, and structure, lacks clarity, and is not concise, but the
meaning is apparent to the reader with some effort. (10-12.8)
FL: Rudimentary skills in expression & presentation of ideas. Not all
material is relevant &/or is presented in a disorganised manner.
Meaning apparent, but writing style not fluent or well organised.
Grammar & spelling contains many errors. (0-9.8)
Referencing
(Value 10%)
HD: Referencing is comprehensive, demonstrates academic
integrity, and conforms exactly to APA style conventions. (8.5-10)
DI: Very good referencing, including reference list and citations.
High quality references. (7.5-8.4)
CR: Good referencing, including reference list and citations. Good
quality references. (6.5-7.4)
PS: Referencing is comprehensive, mostly accurate according to
APA style conventions, and demonstrates academic ntegrity. Some
minor errors or omissions in style and formatting choices (e.g.
italics, punctuation, etc) don’t impact on the transparency and
traceability of the source, or demonstration of academic integrity.
(5-6.4)
FL: Sub-standard (or no) referencing. Poor quality (or no)
references. (0-4.9)
Total Marks
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