Unethical Data Leakage of Facebook: A Case Analysis on Business Ethics and Sustainability

October 19
2018
Bid data leak of
Facebook users in
Australia

Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Unethical data leakage of Facebook..........................................................................................3
Ethical business management practices.....................................................................................5
Virtue ethics:..........................................................................................................................5
Utilitarian ethics:....................................................................................................................5
Deontological ethics:..............................................................................................................6
Ethical business management practice.......................................................................................6
Sustainability of organizations and corporate social responsibilities........................................7
Case analysis..............................................................................................................................7
Recommendations......................................................................................................................9
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................12

Introduction
Today, in the era of cut throat competition a relentless and never-ending contest has begun to
cross the ethical boundaries in doing business. In corporation, the implementation of well-
structured and formulated ethical policy for doing business has several benefits. Business
ethics also include the truthfulness of management with its employees as well as customers.
Today, in the globalising world meeting the needs of present generation without affecting the
future generation’s ability to meet their needs is characterised as the sustainable development.
Since the beginning of this discussion about sustainable development in an ethical manner
until the present day, number of terms related to the sustainable development of ethical
business has grown high (Chakrabarty, & Bass, 2015). Although the idea of sustainable
development has become very common in the work of scholars, it is noticed that there is no
clear definition of sustainable development following the business ethics. Today, with the
increasing competition among organization to increase their own business has somewhere left
the behind the meaning of business ethics. In the immensely competing world organizations
are using unethical business practices to make their business growing (Chell, Spence, Perrini,
& Harris, 2016).
Somewhere, in between business growth, and ethical business, organizations are dominantly
looking for the growth instead of practicing business ethics. Business ethics in the literature
are defined as corporate social responsibility. In this report, a brief discussion about business
ethic and sustainability growth has been made to understand the social responsibilities of
organization in order to make an ethical and sustainable growth for the future generation.
This report discusses the case of unethical Data Leakage, of Facebook back in March 2018.
In the analytical part, this report discusses the case in accordance to the ethical sustainability
of digital world to showcase its responsibility towards the welfare of society.

Unethical data leakage of Facebook
Facebook is a social networking site where people connect with each-other around the world.
This platform requires all the personal information data of its users to create their account. In
this manner, Facebook has an access to millions of people’s personal information (Hern, &
Pegg, 2018). Since a very long time, Facebook is facing data security challenges from
different governments based on reports given by private agencies (Bartholomeusz, 2018). In
the past company has faced several problems questioning about the security of users’
personal information data. Also, company has faced the data leakage in the past.
This report will discuss the case of data breach from Facebook site that was reported in the
news article of The Sydney morning Herald, on 5th April 2018. Rachel Clun has reported the
article with a heading saying, “Facebook says 310,000 Australian users may have been
affected by Cambridge Analytica scandal. In reports, it has been reported that the social
media company revealed that the personal information data of more than 310,000 Australian
Facebook users have been shared their personal information data with Cambridge Analytica.
According to the report, company says that they have potentially shared the data of about 87
million users with the research company, but they don’t know about the exact data or the
exact number of people affected by the data that was given to the research company. report
claims that this is the first official confirmation from the company side about the possible
scope of data leak. Reports have estimated 50 million people gets affected with the data
breach, whereas Facebook estimated up to 311,127 Australians were affected in the big data
breach. Official of the company says that “with the use possible most expensive methodology
this is the best estimated number of unique accounts that directly installed the
“thisisyourdigitallife” application as well as those who have shared their personal information
data with their friends. In the counter argument, Cambridge Analytica said that the company
has licenced the data on only 30 million people instead of 87 million claimed by Facebook