ICT Professional Practice and Ethics

Running head: ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND ETHICS
ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND ETHICS
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1ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND ETHICS
Table of Contents
Background of the Case Study...................................................................................................2
The process followed to achieve the data breach...................................................................3
Facebook’s stand in the case..................................................................................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
References................................................................................................................................10

2ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND ETHICS
Background of the Case Study
Social Networks serve as a medium to connect people around the world. It is a
platform that has the potential to link individuals with their friends, family, social causes and
many more. As per the research done by Boulianne (2015), with the various advantages
involved the social media has gained popularity among the public and it is estimated that
there are almost 2.62 billion social network users as per the researches done in the year 2018.
The popularity of the social networking sites is not limited to any one age group as its craze
has been there in all irrespective of their age. The disadvantages of the social networking
sites are a growing concern especially in case of privacy breaches. The case study considered
to analyze the scenario is that of the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge
Analytica has been in the news since a revelation of a sting operation that showed the senior
executives of the company swaging about manipulating psychologies, entrapping techniques
and performing campaigns on fake news. The giant of the social media platforms that is
Facebook is also amidst a dispute regarding leak of personal information and making use of
the same illegally. The dispute was strong enough and roused questions such as whether these
data were used to influence the results of the presidential elections and the Brexit vote in the
U.S in the year 2016 when Mr. Donald Trump was elected as the president of U.S. As per the
research done by Persily (2017), it was reported on March 16, 2017 that a subgroup of
Cambridge Analytica named Strategic Communications Laboratory was suspended by the
social media giant, Facebook as it had been charged of user’s data collection and at the same
time passing it to Cambridge Analytica. The Britain’s Channel 4 News exposed the senior
executives of Cambridge Analytica along with the CEO of the company while they were
suggesting that the company can make use of sex workers, misinformation and bribes to help
the political candidates gain votes from around the world.

3ICT PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND ETHICS
In the report below the incident will be considered in details and an analysis would be done
referring to the ethics especially the DoingEthics technique.
The process followed to achieve the data breach
As per the research done by Epskamp et al. (2016), psychometrics is a branch of
science that successfully measures the personal traits of an individual. Five dimensions can
be made use of to demonstrate the personality of an individual namely: Neuroticism,
Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. As per the research done by
Garcia-Portilla et al. (2015), The Five dimensions are collectively called the Ocean Method.
In the year 2008, Michael Kosinski a psychologist found out a method that could analyze
individual’s behavior based on the activities of the individual on Facebook. An application
“MyPersonality” was developed that permitted the users to take participation in
questionnaires on psychometric. This app provided results considering the Ocean Method and
many users took part in this leading to the development of huge psychological dataset. An
academic named Aleksandr Kogan wanted to access this dataset but when denied access by
Kosinki created his own app named “thisisyourdigitallife” in the year 2014 and collected data
in a similar process that of MyPersonality and this time the users undertaking the test were
paid for it. As per the research done by Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison (2018), reports
suggest that the app collected the data of the Facebook users and their friends and it almost
went up to 50 million user accounts. Kogan shared the volumes of data with Cambridge
Analytica that used it to develop solution based software that helped influence choices of the
people in the elections as per Christopher Wylie who revealed about the data breach to the
newspapers. According to Wylie this data was used by the company to generate
psychographic profiles of the people and promote pro-Trump material to these profiles
making the online media a medium.