Three Distinct Perspectives of Applied Ethics: A Case Study of Timehop's Data Breach

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This assignment explores the ethical implications of Timehop's data breach incident from three distinct perspectives: professional, sociological, and philosophical. It examines the lack of security measures, the violation of privacy laws, and the moral obligations of the company. The analysis highlights the importance of ethical considerations in the development and use of technology.

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GURU BALA - ITC506 - ASSIGNMENT 1
THREE DISTINCT PERSPECTIVES OF
APPLIED ETHICS
1

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Table of Contents
Timehop’s data breaching incident..................................................................................................3
Professional Perspective.................................................................................................................. 3
Sociological perspective.................................................................................................................. 4
Philosophical perspective................................................................................................................ 5
References........................................................................................................................................7
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Timehop’s data breaching incident
According to (Tavani, 2016), Ethics is considered a branch of philosophy that includes different
concepts of what is right and what is wrong. Ethics is used to solve out the questions related to
the human morality defining them in good and evil, wrong and right, crime and justice etc.
According to Lomas (2014), Timehop is a social application that assesses social accounts. It has
recently disclosed an ethical dilemma on July 7th which was related to the breaching of data. It
has influenced 21 billions of its users and leaked their private information.
The information related to their names, email addresses and phone numbers has been breached.
Timehop has declared its users that network intrusion has been detected on July 4 th that was
because credentials to its cloud environment have been compromised. The unavailability of
multifactor authentication on the cloud account has resulted in this unethical situation. The
timehop have tried their best with the intention to handle this situation in best way possible. The
keys have been deactivated in order to prevent their access by anyone. These keys are
responsible for reading social media posts of the users. The damage was limited to the
information related to credit card and other confidential information has never stored as the
social media content has already been separated from the user’s information.
There are different perspectives of ethics such as philosophical, professional and sociological or
descriptive. A detailed discussion of these perspectives is given below:
Professional Perspective
It covers the corporate as well as personal standards of attitude expected of professionals.
Professional perspectives present the deliberations and reflections that ICT professional have
related to Professional ethics. The professional perspective of Timehop incident is that this
incident was due to the lack of authentication aspects. Timehop has preserved the leakage of
confidential and private information of users through placing separately the application content
from the user’s personal data that includes credit/debit card information or other data related to
finance. As per the professional perspective, the standards have not been followed by the
Timehop. The security of the data stored in a cloud system was a major concern and the
precautions should have been made earlier with intention to prevent this incident.
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This misshapen might not have impacted much but it is required to avoid this kind of data
breaching accidents. The precautions like auditing need to be made, multifactor authentication
measures need to be taken and actions should be performed for enhancing the security of data
stored in cloud.
The professional perspective is the area that determines and assesses problem of ethical
responsibility for ICT professionals. This kind of ethics needs to be followed by every
professional not just by ICT professional. These are the moral issues that had influenced
Timehop. It includes concern related to the client’s satisfaction through protecting their data,
honesty and fairness in businesses is very necessary. They should perform their duties in a way
through which it is ensured that they are ethically correct. The other perspectives like the
sociological and philosophical are also very essential and these ethics should be followed for
preventing any kind of unethical situation. This ethical dilemma of Timehop is due to the reason,
that professional ethics have not been followed. The concern related to security of data has not
taken seriously that has resulted in this loss. Two-factor or multi-factor authentication techniques
should be implemented for security concern. It will enhance the access security that results in
effective determination of identity of users. After the proper identification mechanism, the access
is granted that will prevent the access of unauthorized person.
Sociological perspective
This is also known as Comparative ethics. This is a study made on the beliefs of people
regarding morality. It is research in the minds of different people. This is the division of general
ethics which is used to uncover the beliefs of different people. Sociological ethics is all about
finding out that which actions promotes and motivates the prosocial behaviour. It presents a clear
understanding of what behaviours or actions are punishable in the society. It shows that what the
behaviours with the overriding importance are. These behaviours are punishable that have a
negative impact to criticize the defaulters for doing something unethical (Kumar, et. al., 2015).
In the given case, Timehop, a social application from where the information of the users has been
leaked such as their names, their numbers and their e-mail addresses etc. All this information
was leaked the breach of Privacy Act occurred. As per the Sociological ethics, this conduct was
4

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unethical as it involves the provisions of punishment under the Privacy Act, 1988. As it has been
discussed that sociological ethics are about studying the mind of people and their beliefs in the
morality, in this particular case according to the general public it is completely unethical that the
private information of the users has been leaked. This conduct has proved to be a cause of
suffering to those users as they have fear that their information can be misused by anyone. In this
case, the damage was not so high because there was no monetary information such as credit card
details of the users so the situation is not that much out of the box (Denzin, 2017). But still as
descriptive or sociological ethics it has been assessed that what is wrong and what is right, what
is crime and what is justice. In this particular case the situation was completely unethical because
it adversely affected the interest of a large segment of public. According to the case study data of
21 billion users was leaked. It is not acceptable in the society so as per the breach of Privacy Act
this act creates an ethical dilemma that needs to be solved within a particular time and punishable
under the law. To solve this ethical dilemma, the access to such application should be banned by
the people and necessary corrective measures should be taken by The Timehop to protect the
interest and personal information of its users so that such situation does not arise in future
(Murphy, 2018).
Philosophical perspective
Ethics is itself a part of philosophy that provides the standards for different tasks that what are to
be done and what are not to be done. It deals with what is good and what is bad. It presents a way
to understand that why should anyone be moral and what is the relation between the morality and
the self-interest. It tries to find out that from where does morality come from (Tavani, 2016).
These philosophical ethics are further divided into two subsections and these are metaethics and
normative ethics. Different substantive ethical questions are included in this normative ethics
such as what the value was and what the moral obligations of someone are (Murphy, 2018). It
provides a basis to judge the moral values and which actions are acceptable as per our
obligations and which are not. There is a difference between the duty and obligation that duty
can be performed or not to be performed on the discretion of the person but the obligations are
compulsory to be performed by such person and if not performed then the penalties can also be
imposed. On the other hand, taking meta-ethics into consideration, it asks some philosophical
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questions regarding ethics. These questions are what ethics is and what can make it the case that
we ought to do something (Lomas, 2018).
Philosophical ethics has been described as a project which integrates these normative ethics and
the meta-ethics in an integrative way to gain a view that what is valuable and what is obligatory.
In this particular case where Timehop has been accused to be an application that became
responsible for the leakage of the personal information of around 21 billion users (Cotton, 2014).
In this case the credentials to the cloud environment were compromised because of that the
whole information of the users were compromised. The perspective of this philosophical ethics
was to answer than questions regarding what is valuable and what has value. Apart from this
what are the obligations. In this case, the obligations to keep the data secure, safe and private was
not fulfilled hence it became punishable under the law which gave rise to the ethical dilemma.
Timehop is trying and giving his best efforts to solve this unethical situation. But as it did not
fulfil its obligation and hurt the sentiments of their users so it has become an unethical situation
and required to be solved as soon as it is possible (Denzin, 2017).
The adoption and the utilization of ICT lead to several incidents like in this case of Timehop, it
was related to the breaching of data. The leakage of data influences the reputation of application
and user’s data to get compromised. This is the major issue which is due to the lack of
implementation of ethics that need to be considered while performing ICT tasks. The
sociological, philosophical and professional perspectives have been discussed in this assignment
which is in concern with the effective follow-up of standards and guidelines in order to
effectively deal with this kind of ethical dilemma (Van den Hoven, et. al., 2015).
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References
Cotton, M. (2014). Ethics and Technology Assessment: A participatory approach (Vol. 13).
Heidelberg: Springer. Retrieved from: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-
45088-4.
Denzin, N. K. (2017). Sociological methods: A sourcebook. Routledge.
Kumar, B., Abhishek, K., Kumar, A., & Singh, M. P. (2015). System and method for mitigating
cross vm attacks in cloud computing by securing the network traffic. In Computer Applications
& Industrial Electronics (ISCAIE), 2015 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 221-225). IEEE. Retrieved
from: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7298360/.
Lomas, N, (2018). Timehop discloses July 4 data breach affecting 21 million. (2018). [Online]
Tech Crunch. Retrieved from: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/09/timehop-discloses-july-4-data-
breach-affecting-21-million/.
Murphy, N. (2018). Anglo-American postmodernity: Philosophical perspectives on science,
religion, and ethics. Routledge.
Tavani, H. T. (2016). Ethics and technology: Controversies, questions, and strategies for ethical
computing. ProQuest. Available at:
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/lib/CSUAU/detail.action?
docID=5106471.
Van den Hoven, J., Vermaas, P., & Van de Poel, I. (2015). Handbook of ethics, values and
technological design. Dordrecht: Springer. Retrieved from:
https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007%2F978-94-007-6970-0.
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Three Distinct Perspectives of Applied Ethics: A Case Study of Timehop's Data Breach

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