Ethics And Social Issues For Intangible Infrastructure

Ethical issues from the viewpoints of various stakeholders involved

Describe about the Ethics and Social Issues for Intamgible Infrastructure.

We live in the era of information technology. There has been tremendous improvement in the physical as well as intangible infrastructure required for collection, analysis and interpretation of data. Business organizations collect large amounts of data related to its customers, employees and other stakeholders and use it for a variety of commercial purposes such as enhancing their understanding of the users’ needs, to increase business, enhancing their profitability, gaining market share and so on (Carroll and Buchholtz 2014). 

 Large volumes of data measured in peta bytes and beyond can be centrally stored and retrieved effortlessly. The report discusses the privacy related ethical issues raised by IT capabilities. There are multiple issues concerning the privacy of data, this report, however, discusses the burning issue – does availability of information justify its use? “In this context, it is important to question that just because an organization has means to collect data that can be architected for a particular purpose it does not imply that they can use it even if the privacy rights of the individual are violated?” The report discusses the issues of privacy in context of Facebook’s unethical data mining and exploitation of user’s private data (Von 2013).

In the recent past Facebook has been criticized over the use of user’s personal data. The Facebook application has been using the private data of its users for commercial purposes. It uses the data to identify user’s behavioural patterns and sells that data to a third party. The data is also used to identify users’ interests and to bombard them with the online adverts and other contents based on the data provided by customers. This activity in a sense acts a technique to minimize user’s exposure to other relevant content that they might be interested in and influences user’s buying behaviours and also affects other psychological factors (Tran et al. 2013).

The private data and information uploaded by users on the Facebook is meant for better identification of the individual users so that they can easily connect with family and friends. Facebook seeks various types of data from the users claiming better user experience. However, there have been incidences where these data are used for commercial purposes without users knowing it (Young and Quan-Haase 2013). The private identification is collected by Facebook may sometimes include copies of driver’s licence, photo ids, and other sensitive information. This has caused great concern among users who practice discretion over such information. Moreover, the data is stored on the servers of Facebook and used for various purposes that users have not given their permission for. Other ethical issues in violation of data privacy include establishing the accountability of the consequences of such violations. Business organizations that collect data are subject to broader range of social criticism and are required to maintain integrity in the business functions (Galliers and Leidner 2014). 

Resolving these issues through ethical avenues rather than legal ones

However, sometimes it is difficult to understand what constitutes violation of privacy as the data collected is meant to enhance overall customer experience. Companies collect data to enhance the quality of services and product, but sometimes, the data is wrongly interpreted and used for purposes that are not intended by the business itself. In this regard, it is important for the businesses to implement strict data monitoring so that data is used for intended purposes and does not cause any mental or emotional agony to the users. The various stakeholders such as the users’, corporation and the government have some underlying responsibility in ensuring the privacy of data is maintained. For instance, users are required to understand the consequences of providing sensitive data to public forums. The data provided can be used by third parties to track and influence the users; in addition, sensitive data can be used against the users. Therefore, users are required to exercise discretion while disclosing sensitive information. Similarly, corporations are required to ensure that data is used after proper authorization by the users and only trusted third parties can access the users’ data. Moreover, the government is also required to work in close association with the large corporate houses and ensure that sensitive data is used in ethical manner to eliminate the issues of data privacy (Baskerville and Wood-Harper 2016).

The best resolution for such issues can be achieved through ethical avenues rather than legal means as Facebook or other organization can easily hide behind the facade of informed agreements to Facebook’s data use policy. Moreover, these privacy policies are changed so frequently that it is not possible for individual users to monitor how their data would be used.

Ethics implies the generally accepted notion of what is right and wrong and is more universal than the legal framework. In this context, it is important to understand that how data is being used and whether it is used to benefit the business or the society as a whole. In order to resolve privacy issues through ethical avenues following data points must be considered. It is important to understand that privacy of data is increasingly important for protection of human dignity and is fundamental human right and it should be given utmost importance while collecting and utilizing private data (Tene and Polonetsky 2012).

It is the responsibility of all the stakeholders where personal data is involved to exercise extraordinary level of discretion while using such data. Defining effective compliance for supporting legal and regulatory obligations should be used as a starting point for incorporating a greater moral framework for the betterment of society. For the business organizations, it is important that they implement strong controls all along the data supply chain involving collection, aggregation, sharing, analysis, monetization, storage and disposal. Further, it is important for businesses to accept data ethics as business risk and implement ethical data practices as a core of business strategy (Brandimarte et al. 2013).

Ethical obligations of all stakeholders towards each other and general population

It is important to determine the issues such as who should exercise control over the information, how much and what kinds of data can be used by the organizations for commercial purposes, and maintaining contextual integrity of the data usage. Some of the fundamental practices concerning data privacy and usage include providing users’ sensitive data to third parties for the purpose of commercial marketing, data mining, and surveillance or research purposes. In this context, it is important to understand that users must be made aware in advance. Moreover, users must be provided with the option to opt out of unethical practices of tracking user activities and using the data collected for commercial purposes without their consent (Johnson et al. 2012).

In order to assist the business corporations from avoiding the instances of data privacy violation, ACS provides following guidelines that should be incorporated by Facebook in their business model. These ethical guidelines include –

The first point that businesses must consider is that the interest of public must be held at top priority, above from the interests of interests of business. Therefore, the users’ data available within the organization must be used for their benefit and convenience rather than for commercial activities. Secondly, the organization must follow the principles of honesty and integrity in respect to using users’ data. The data should be used for enhancing the quality of life of the users. Lastly, the business organization must be professional in their approach and data should be used enhance the integrity of the society and all the stakeholders involved (Recker 2015).  

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that today’s society is data driven and data is involved at all the aspects of life whether for individuals and organization. The exponential growth in information technology, both in hardware and software have enabled the government and business organizations to store and retrieve large volumes of data effortlessly. Large corporations are collecting huge volumes of customers’ data are used for various commercial purposes. This has raised the issues of violation of data privacy. In this regard, many corporations are facing various litigations; however, these issues can be better managed by adopting ethical business practices rather than through legal avenues. Moreover, it is important to understand data privacy, control and usage from the perspectives of all the stakeholders involved. Every stakeholder that includes customers, corporate houses, government as well as government is facing ethical dilemma, regarding the best practices of data privacy and control. Therefore, these issues can be resolved more effectively through ethical means. What is legal might not be ethical, such as it may be possible for business organizations to use customers’ data for commercial purposes, but that may fall in the purview of unethical practices and both the organization and customers would have to face the consequences in the end. Therefore, it is important for the all the stakeholders to comply with ethical obligations with respect to each and the data involved. In this regard, the Australian Computer Society has developed a standard Code of Ethics that is applicable for all the IT organizations. These guidelines helps the business to adopt a more ethical business practice aimed at protecting the interests of all the stakeholders involved.

References

Baskerville, R.L. and Wood-Harper, A.T., 2016. A critical perspective on action research as a method for information systems research. In Enacting Research Methods in Information Systems: Volume 2 (pp. 169-190). Springer International Publishing.

Brandimarte, L., Acquisti, A. and Loewenstein, G., 2013. Misplaced confidences privacy and the control paradox. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(3), pp.340-347.

Carroll, A.B. and Buchholtz, A.K., 2014. Business and society: Ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management. Nelson Education.

Galliers, R.D. and Leidner, D.E., 2014. Strategic information management: challenges and strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.

Johnson, M., Egelman, S. and Bellovin, S.M., 2012, July. Facebook and privacy: it’s complicated. In Proceedings of the eighth symposium on usable privacy and security (p. 9). ACM.

Recker, J., 2015. Research on conceptual modelling: less known knowns and more unknown unknowns, please. In Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (Vol. 165, pp. 3-7). Australian Computer Society.

Tene, O. and Polonetsky, J., 2012. Big data for all: Privacy and user control in the age of analytics. Nw. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop., 11, p.xxvii.

Tran, S.T., Le Ngoc Thanh, N.Q.B. and Phuong, D.B., 2013. Introduction to information technology. In Proc. of the 9th inter. CDIO conf.(CDIO).

Von Schomberg, R., 2013. A vision of responsible research and innovation.Responsible innovation: Managing the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society, pp.51-74.

Young, A.L. and Quan-Haase, A., 2013. Privacy protection strategies on Facebook: The Internet privacy paradox revisited. Information, Communication & Society, 16(4), pp.479-500.