Open Editorial: Ethical Considerations of Human Dignity in Business

This essay, titled "Open Editorial," examines the critical role of human dignity in contemporary business practices. It begins by establishing human dignity as a cornerstone of Catholic social thought and highlights the ethical frameworks developed globally to protect individual rights across various sectors, including business, healthcare, and academics. The essay raises a central question: whether businesses truly uphold the meaning of human dignity when interacting with consumers. It defines human dignity as the preservation of self-respect and worth, emphasizing the importance of respecting beliefs, values, and privacy. The essay discusses privacy as a key component of human dignity, and how businesses, particularly social media applications, often exploit user data through practices like tracking and targeted advertising, despite asking for informed consent. The author provides examples of applications like Facebook and Uber, which track customer locations, potentially violating privacy. The essay concludes by questioning the authenticity of informed consent and calls for stricter regulations to protect consumer dignity and privacy, advocating for ethical business strategies that prioritize consumer confidentiality and well-being.

Running head: OPEN EDITORIAL
OPEN EDITORIAL
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Out of the 9 important principles of catholic social thought, human dignity has been
considered to be the most significant. Different countries of the world have developed their
own ethical Framework which is followed in different sectors of the nation. Starting from
business, academic, Healthcare and many other sectors, all are advised to follow ethical
principles and incorporate the importance of human dignity and maintenance of activities for
common good for the citizens of the nation (Cuzzocrea 2014). Different organisations and
businesses have therefore paid much importance for the protection of human rights and
dignity while dealing with different customers in every corners of the nation. However the
concern arises that “are the businesses really meeting up the true expectation of the meaning
of the word dignity while handling business with the common people for common good”?
Human dignity can be defined as the aspect of maintaining self respect and self worth
of every individuals of the nation. This is helpful in respecting the beliefs, values as well as
wishes of all the different citizens who are touched by business and thereby not impressing
others beliefs or facts on them for making more profit (Wiesnieski et al. 2015). This is
extremely important for respecting the integrity of social system of the country.
Privacy is one of the most important components of human dignity and therefore each
and every business organisations are requested to maintain the confidentiality and privacy of
their consumers. They are advised to work ethically so that they do not breach any human
rights and do not get involved in any legal obligations. The laws have become quite strict in
every Nation about the maintenance of privacy and confidentiality but still there are many
organisations who have found different ways strategically to trick the common citizens and
gather their information for their own benefits (Shklovski et al. 2014).
This can be described with the help of an example. The social media have launched
many applications over the year which first asks their consumers of informed consent before

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guiding the consumers into their own website. While providing the informed consent the
visitors of the site are asked to fulfil a page of information. While providing the consent,
consumers remain unaware about how the information would be used by the apps for their
own purposes (Abawaijy, Ninggal and Herawan 2016). It is found that even after the visitors
leave the site, the applications use the information to track different searches made by the
visitors over the Internet. They then use this information to provide options to the visitor
either to buy their service or product. This has made the consumers fearful of the fact that
whenever they might go online, they will be tracked and different information about their
activities online would be noted
Some of the greatest example can be provided by the different renowned applications
like Facebook, Uber as well as many other applications. They track down the location of their
customers even without the permission of the customer. They provide search suggestions
stating that the area where they are present right now have cabs available which day can take
access to for their benefits. All these make customers feel insecure that even the places that
they go are noticed by these applications (Wang, Grossklags and Xu 2013). All these
activities thereby question one fact, “The informed consent which was asked by the
applications to the consumer is really serving their purpose of respecting the autonomy and
privacy of the consumers”.
All the social application organisations are of the opinion that they are actually
helping the consumers when they are in distress or when they are searching for particular
services which are unable to find otherwise. They say that they are doing this for the common
good and maintaining the human dignity of the consumer by asking them for permission
before logging them into their services (Cuzzocrea 2014). However there is another face to
this opinion. They are mainly doing this for their own profit as more they provide suggestions
to the consumer; the probability of the consumers taking their services increases and this in

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turn increases the profitability. Therefore the ethical framework of every Nation should make
strong legislations and rules against all such social application companies so that they cannot
exploit the dignity of consumers in the name of providing service for the common good
(Mamonov and Benbunan-Fich 2015). Proper strategies should be found out by this company
if they really want to help the consumer, without disrupting their confidentiality and privacy.

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References:
Abawajy, J. H., Ninggal, M. I. H., and Herawan, T. 2016. Privacy preserving social network
data publication. IEEE communications surveys and tutorials, 18(3), 1974-1997.
Cuzzocrea, A. 2014, November. Privacy and security of big data: current challenges and
future research perspectives. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Privacy
and Secuirty of Big Data (pp. 45-47). ACM.
Mamonov, S., and Benbunan-Fich, R. 2015. An empirical investigation of privacy breach
perceptions among smartphone application users. Computers in Human Behavior, 49, 427-
436.
Shklovski, I., Mainwaring, S. D., Skúladóttir, H. H., and Borgthorsson, H. 2014, April
Leakiness and creepiness in app space: Perceptions of privacy and mobile app use.
In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing
systems (pp. 2347-2356). ACM.
Wang, N., Grossklags, J., and Xu, H. 2013, February. An online experiment of privacy
authorization dialogues for social applications. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on
Computer supported cooperative work(pp. 261-272). ACM.
Wisniewski, P., Xu, H., Lipford, H., and Bello‐Ogunu, E. 2015. Facebook apps and tagging:
The trade‐off between personal privacy and engaging with friends. Journal of the Association
for Information Science and Technology, 66(9), 1883-1896.