Business Ethics: Facebook Data Privacy Scandals and Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Running head: BUSINESS ETHICS
Business Ethics
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Introduction
Ethics can be defined as the study and application of the moral principles that are
constituted by the values and judgments in relation to the differentiation between right and
wrong. Morality or moral standards are the norms, beliefs and values that have been embedded
in the social processes that are seen to be defining for an individual the difference between what
is right and what is wrong. The rules and principles for the differentiation of right from wrong
are called as the ethical theories. There are two types of ethical theories for the determination of
rights and wrongs in any given situation. These two theories are Normative ethical theories for
the prescription of the correct way of acting in a moral way and the descriptive ethical theory
that describes the decision making process of a business. The study of the situations, activities
and decisions of the business in relation to the issues of the address of right and wrong are
known as business ethics. The role of business can be seen to be acting as stabilizer or an advisor
on the controversies relating to the ethical misconducts, acting as planner to provide the early
warnings of the ethical issues and to be planning and developing ethical codes for ethical issues
that have been nonexistence previously, acting as a consultant, reporter, an auditor for the
verification of ethical performance and an advisor of the ways to be improving ethical
performance and on which ethical pitfalls may be lying ahead, acting as conspirator for slowing
down technological changes, acting as gatekeeper for warning about possible ethical dilemmas.
In the current essay the issues in the business ethics in relation to Facebook’s personal data
privacy and security have been discussed. In this essay the ethical issues regarding the personal
data privacy and security policies of the Facebook are discussed in detail. The issues by
Facebook by breaching the privacy and the security of the users that are considered as unethical

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are discussed. The cases where there has been a breach of ethical policies are discussed in detail
along with the legal implications and their impacts and influences both locally and globally. The
reasons of the company behind such unethical practice have been analyzed. The essay further
discusses the ethical or legal principles that have been violated by Facebook by the way of
breach of privacy and security of the users.
Facebook Data Privacy Scandals
In its relatively short existence facebook has been subject to many privacy related issues.
Although in the last fourteen years there have been many scandals related to the breach of
privacy data by facebook however the biggest data privacy scandal of the facebook has been
revealed by a whistleblower called Christopher Wylie about the firm Cambridge Analytica.
However this is not the first time that facebook has been in a scandal relating to data privacy
(Rubinstein & Good, 2013). On December 2007 facebook got into an issue with privacy
regarding its program called the Beacon which tracked the activities of the users in other
websites and automatically added them to the profiles of the facebook users. The titles of the
videos rented by the users from another website were being published on the newsfeeds of the
facebook profiles of the users by the program. This was a direct violation of the provisions of the
Video Privacy Protection Act 1988. There was a class-action suit filed against facebook for an
amount of $9.5 million which was a part of a settlement agreement for a fund for security and
privacy. Because of an incident in the year 2009 in which the private information of the users
were shared publicly, an investigation was conducted by FTC in 2011 (Martin, Borah &
Palmatier, 2017). Following the investigation facebook was seen to be entering into a decree of
consent in which addressing of the concerns of the tracking and sharing of the user data was

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promised. In 2013 the details of a bug were disclosed by facebook that has been exposing the
personal details of about six million users within a period of almost over a year. The data which
was exposed was taken from the contact lists of the users without their permissions.
Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal
The biggest data privacy scandal of the facebook has been revealed by a whistleblower
called Christopher Wylie about the firm Cambridge Analytica. The scandal is seen to be
centering on the collection of data of around 87 million people that can be identifiable personally
(Schneble, Elger & Shaw, 2018). Access to these data of the users of the facebook was easily
available by the way of influencing various factors that include inadequate measures of
safeguard against those companies that engage in the process of data harvesting, almost
inexistent oversight of the developers of the facebook, abuse of the developers by the API of
facebook and the agreement of the users over the terms and conditions. The personally
identifiable information of the users was collected by Cambridge Analytica through a personality
quiz app. By adding the app to the facebook account of a user, the creator of the quiz app gets
access to all information relating to profile and user history of the user who is taking that
particular quiz and also the friends of the user on the facebook. According to claims made in a
paper by the researchers who were associated with the Cambridge University that the data
harvested by the apps can be used for the automatic and accurate predictions of some personal
attributes that can be described as highly sensitive(Zunger, 2018). These attributes are age,
gender, sexual orientation, happiness, personality traits, political and religious views, ethnicity,
intelligence, parental separation and use of addictive substances. The data collected by
Cambridge Analytica can be seen to be affecting tens of millions of the U.S citizens even