ICT Professional Practice and Ethics - Cambridge Analytica Case Analysis

ICT Professional Practice and Ethics 1
ICT Professional Practice and Ethics-Cambridge Analytica Case Analysis
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ICT Professional Practice and Ethics 2
Executive summary
The use of information management technology in behavioral science to analyze
personality types through tailored messages is a new method that is used by politicians to gain
interest in the current generation. Despite the fact that it seems to be beneficial to politicians, it is
accompanied by its consequences. It was revealed that a British political data firm known as
Cambridge Analytica unethically accessed and manipulated the data of over 87000000 American
Facebook users that was done with the help of a Cambridge University professor Aleksandr
Kogan. The application is alleged to be used in support of the republicans’ victory in the
American’s 2016 election. This document will focus on the scenario by doing analysis of the
case in light of the “Doing Ethics Technique,” the paper will further apply the Australian
Computer Society code of conduct in evaluation of the case after which the paper will provide
consequent recommendation regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal. From this section, this
document is organized in the following manner: introduction which provides an overview of the
case after which we have background information then an analysis of the case in accordance with
the “Doing Ethics Technique,” the next section involves the analysis of the situation from the
ACS codes stance and then lastly conclusion which summarizes the case and presents
recommendations.

ICT Professional Practice and Ethics 3
Introduction and Background of the study
It was recently revealed that a British Political data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica
unethically gained access, manipulated and retain data for 8,700,000 Facebook users with the
help of a professor at Cambridge University named Aleksandr Kogan. The data collected was
then used in favor of the Republicans in the US election. However, the republicans quickly
rejected the role Cambridge Analytica played in the election claiming that data from all states
never contributed to the victory of President Donald Trump (Meredith 2018, pp.01). The incident
has, however, posed a lot of questions concerning the how and when it happened. This report
was referred to as data breach. Paul Grewal who is the deputy general counsel for Facebook,
however, responded to that by saying that calling the incident data breach was completely false.
The Facebook official argue that the users who were signing up in Kogan’s application, “This is
your digital life,” which was used to collect the data for all that population offered their consent
hence no any password was retrieved by means of hacking nor did any infiltration take place.
According to Paul Grewal, the fact that Facebook users provided their consents to
Kogan’s application is technically true and is ethical. However, which Facebook database was
never penetrated, the fact remains that the massive data were from Facebook friends of the
individuals who signed up in the Kogan’s application. What makes the matter worse is that the
application users’s friends never gave any consent for their data to get accessed and neither of
the app users who signed up were not made aware that a third party may be given access to their
data (Meredith 2018, pp.01). In this case, the researcher who had a legitimate permission to
access Facebook users acted in a bad way. The scandal elucidates serious problems as far as
information technology ethics and professionalism is concerned.

ICT Professional Practice and Ethics 4
The purpose of this article is to evaluate the ethical misconduct concerning collecting
data online for political gains by gaining access to individuals’ consents. The Cambridge
Analytica tool have been helping politicians in running the behavioral micro-data campaigns by
collecting and analyzing individual’s data through big data analysis strategies and using the
insights from behavioral science for targeting advertisements which are based on the individual’s
personality type. Campaigns which are driven by personality type data identification is better
than campaigns due to the available data. The Cambridge analytica application mainly identify
personality types of individuals using online questionnaires but the application can also do
categorization for those who participate in an online research. The extrapolation is facilitated by
multiple publicly and commercially available data points (Meredith 2018, pp. 01). It is also
essential to understand that despite the fact that chances are low that social media like Facebook
cannot share its user’s sensitive information but can promote the given advertisements upon
request by politicians.
This document analyze the scenario by “Doing Ethics techniques” approach and from the
view point of the Australian Computer Society ACS code of ethics and discuss the evolving
applications through assessment of possible consequences (Al-Saggaf and Burmeister, 2012,
pp.237-255; Lekakos, Vlachos, and Koritos, 2014, pp.103-117; Antero, 2017, pp. 267-288; Al-
Saggaf, 2017, pp. 32-46). Suggestions and evaluation of the possible solutions will also be done
on basis of the existing theories concerning ethics in order to achieve the best possible approach
for this situation. Additionally, more research shall be done using the ACS codes of ethics and
consequent reasoning shall be logically made.
Analysis of the situation using the “Doing Ethics Technique”
1. What is going on?