Facebook Cambridge Analytical Case: Ethical Issues and Actions Taken

Information ethics

INFORMATION ETHICS
1
Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Facebook Cambridge analytical case.................................................................................................2
Ethical issues involved.......................................................................................................................4
Who is affected?................................................................................................................................5
Actions were taken by company........................................................................................................5
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................6
References.............................................................................................................................................7

INFORMATION ETHICS
2
Introduction
In the year 2010, the Facebook developed and launched the open graph
application that enables third party developers to reach Facebook consumers and
access their private information along with their family’s data. It is one of the common
privacy issue faced by the numbers of users due to which many consumers lost their
private details like photos, name, address and so on (Vox, 2019). This report objective is
to analyse the Facebook Cambridge analytical case and identify the ethical issues
associated with this article. In this study, the new article that was published on 18th
march 2019 will be discussed with the complete information about the case and data
privacy issues. Due to this problem numbers of users and stakeholders were affected
and users lost their personal information and data. This report is divided into several
sections, for example, Facebook Cambridge analytical case, ethical issues involves,
actions taken by the company, and conclusion.
Facebook Cambridge analytical case
In the year 2010, the Facebook social media application developed an advanced
application that was an open graph that enables the third party websites to gather data
and information of users and their friend's information. In the year 2013, Cambridge
academic Aleksandr Kogan produced an application on Facebook along with his
organization Global Science Research. Mainly, this application asked some question to
consumers in order to design a psychological profile and around 300000 consumers
provided their personal information for generating a psychological profile and this
process harvested their personal information (BBC News, 2019).
It is one of the common privacy and data issue cases that was published by many
researchers and recently the Julia Carrie published a news article on Facebook
Cambridge analytical on 18th march 2019 (The Guardian, 2019). This news article
highlighted that Cambridge analytical used the collected data and information in Ted
Cruz’s presidential campaign. This article also identified that in the year 2017, the
Cambridge analytica collected the private details of the 50 million Facebook users and
this data later revised as 87 million. It is observed that after this privacy issue the
management team of Facebook changed their security and privacy policy and
eliminated the Open graph website but this policy was not retroactively imposed.