IT Ethics: Analyzing Facebook Data Breach through Ethical Lenses

This essay provides an ethical analysis of the 2018 Facebook data breach, where personal information was accessed during the Cambridge Analytica incident, affecting approximately 87 million users. The analysis employs three distinct perspectives of applied ethics: professional, philosophical, and sociological/descriptive. From a professional ethics standpoint, the essay discusses the responsibility of professionals to maintain standards, protect data, and prevent breaches. The philosophical ethics perspective examines the moral considerations and the ethical choices made by both Facebook and the hackers involved. The sociological/descriptive ethics perspective explores various ethical theories and their implications, emphasizing the importance of empirical research and proactive measures to prevent future data breaches. The essay concludes by highlighting the need for organizations to implement robust security systems and conduct audits to safeguard user data and uphold ethical standards.

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1. Introduction
In 2018, Facebook started alerting some of their users about a major form of breach of
data within their personal information. This information was accessed during the Cambridge
Analytica Data Breach (Allen et al., 2018). The users were mainly affected during the breach
of data. It was estimated by the company that nearly 87 million people were affected during
the data breach activity, which was much higher than the expected anticipation. Based on the
research conducted over the data breach, it was observed that the mostly affected users of the
data breach were mainly located within the U.S, Philippines, U.K and Indonesia.
It was also confirmed by the organization that most of the affected users would be
able to receive a detailed message within their news feed. Based on the activities on the
breaches of data, Facebook had implemented a form of notice that would be titled as
“Protecting your Information”. This would be supplemented with a link, which would be
used to view the apps that were used by users and also the kind of information that were
shared by those kind of apps. With the help of this information, Facebook would be able to
shut the individual apps or might would even turn off the access of information by these
third-party applications (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018).
The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was mainly
dedicated towards the enhancement of the features of security within their application. The
enhancement would necessarily be needed based on the large number of user base. The
breach of data would primarily affect the customers as their data would be hacked and it
would lead to tremendous aftermaths. Based on the leaks of data, it was suggested by
Facebook security officials that the users should be extremely proactive and should keep a
check whether the data was leaked before the appearance of the warning link on the timeline
of the user.
2. Professional Ethics Perspectives
The ethics based on profession would be mainly defined as the standards that would
be maintained by the professionals. It is mainly expected that each person who would be
working within the same corporate area, would be following the same corporate standards
throughout the service. In an ethical fashion, the aspect of profession should be limited to the
behavior of that profession. This would mean that the professional should not perform such
activities, which might pose any form of professional harm to the concerned person or within
the organization (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016).
Every professional undergoes several severe trainings before stepping within their
respective professions. This brings a huge form of responsibility to the professional to
perform better within the organization. In addition to these facts, the protection of individual
profession is also the major responsibility of the professional. There should be a positive
attitude within the professional based on their profession (Durkheim, 2013). Any form of
activity, which might cause harm to the professional and the respective organization should
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be dealt accordingly and hence the activities should be barred based on the professional
ethical values (Harriss, MacSween & Atkinson, 2017).
In this case scenario, the breach of data within Facebook is considered to be a major
matter of concern. The breach of data is majorly considered as a major ethical based
implication that is imposed by Professional Ethics. The ethical implications should be kept to
protect the systems from such kind of groups who tend to breach within the security systems.
Facebook should be very much careful as they handle a huge amount of data. This is
meant to secure the confidential data of the users. The failure during the application of
appropriate measures in order to secure the data from breaches is another form of implication
that would disregard the ethics of profession.
3. Philosophical Ethics Perspectives
Philosophical Ethics is one of the important perspective based on human conduct that
would pose a question before the professionals. It is extremely essential to be morally correct
in the cases of professional conduct. Each individual should be honest and true within their
individual professional works. However, this would not be the proper fact of justification that
if an individual would not be able to justify their role of morality towards their professional
life, then the individual could defy the professional ethics (Darwall, 2018).
Ethical choices are considered as one of the toughest choices that would be needed to
be made within the professional life cycle. The experiences gained by a professional during
their everyday processes of life would be helpful in deciding between the right and wrong
doings of moral life. However, the conscience of an individual based on right or wrong would
primarily depend on the perspective of the respective individual. It would vary from one
person to the other.
The hack of the data within Facebook was primarily conducted by some hacker group
who tried to breach with the data of the organization. Before the conduction of the hack
within the organization, the hacker should have an approach based on the creation of the
software that would be beneficial within their profession (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2016). The
purpose of the people who pose the data breaches within an organization is mainly to harm
others. Based on the philosophical perspective, it would be suggested that the group of
hackers should consider their acts before performing them. The ethical considerations should
be also be kept in mind by the hackers. They should not perform such kind of acts, which
might be the cause of harm and might lead them to serious consequences after performing
them.
4. Sociological/Descriptive Ethics Perspectives
There are several aspects based on the perspective of ethics based on any
phenomenon. They are meta-ethics, normative ethics, descriptive ethics and applied ethics.
The meta-ethics would be able to describe the definite ethical theories that would be in
relation with the various ethical based implications based on the behavioral action of an
individual. The normative ethics would imply the ethical ways with which each person would
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be able to follow an ethical balance within their professional life (Greenwood, 2013). The
primary perspective of the descriptive ethics would be able to bridge the gap between the
cumulative aspects of ethical based behavior based on their professional career. It should be
kept in mind that the concern of descriptive ethics should be the primary concern based on an
empirical research towards the attitudes of several different people or different communities.
This would be helpful for analyzing the various ethical implications towards the respective
professions (Tavani, 2017).
In this ethical implication, this is a big breach of data within Facebook and has
affected nearly 87 million people. It should be taken into account that these kind of serious
data breaches should not be repeated on a daily basis. Hence, the company would be taking
serious measures, which would be implemented within the security systems of the
organization. The organization should perform audits on some users based on their suspicious
activity. The company should perform upon the past steps, which were taken by several
users. This would help in deciding the wrong doings based on the ethical implications and
thus would help in suggesting their users to perform right acts in order to prevent the data
breaches (Spiekermann et al., 2015).
5. References
Allen, D., Berg, A., Berg, C., & Potts, J. (2018). Some Economic Consequences of the
GDPR.
Cadwalladr, C., & Graham-Harrison, E. (2018). The Cambridge Analytica Files. The
Guardian. Retrieved Mar, 17, 2018.
Darwall, S. (2018). Philosophical Ethics: An Historical and Contemporary Introduction.
Routledge.
Durkheim, E. (2013). Professional ethics and civic morals. Routledge.
Greenwood, M. (2013). Ethical analyses of HRM: A review and research agenda. Journal of
Business Ethics, 114(2), 355-366.
Harriss, D. J., MacSween, A., & Atkinson, G. (2017). Standards for ethics in sport and
exercise science research: 2018 update. International journal of sports
medicine, 38(14), 1126-1131.
Shapiro, J. P., & Stefkovich, J. A. (2016). Ethical leadership and decision making in
education: Applying theoretical perspectives to complex dilemmas. Routledge.
Shapiro, J. P., & Stefkovich, J. A. (2016). Ethical leadership and decision making in
education: Applying theoretical perspectives to complex dilemmas. Routledge.
Spiekermann, S., Acquisti, A., Böhme, R., & Hui, K. L. (2015). The challenges of personal
data markets and privacy. Electronic Markets, 25(2), 161-167.
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Tavani, H. T. (2017). Incorporating a Critical Reasoning Component into the ICT–Ethics
Methodological Framework. ORBIT Journal, 1(2).
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