Facebook and Privacy Essay

Ex-Apple Engineer, Peter Warden, has calm public buff page info from 215 million Facebook pages, revealing current trends, such as God being the number atomic number 53 roughly popular yellowish brown page among Facebook recitationrs in the Southern U. S. , whereas Barack Obama featured heavily for San Francisco users, and Starbucks was number one in Idaho. Warden plans to release this data to the academic community because he sees wide potential in the data that can be extracted from these puts. This process is called data harvesting.The article suggests future academic work inthis area is potential to occu impacting on peoples privacy. (FACTS 100 words) Response The ETHICAL break central to this article is privacy and control. On one hand, Warden claims his intentions are unselfish (helpful to others) and that the data he is making visible here is a outlet of public discourse. However, the FACTS are that individual users who are generating this data stand neither been consulted about the data collection nor have they given permission for Warden to use it. Clearly Warden does not VALUE others peoples privacy as much as he WANTS (emotion) to create the website.The seam could be made that once a user becomes a cull out of a page on Facebook or, indeed, publishes any content to the internet, that information becomes public. drug user who have deployed privacy settings to carefully maintain a strong consciousness of control over their profiles, however, might well facial expression very mad about this use of their data. Facebook can harvest that data (and does, for targeted advertising purposes) because they have a commitment to those advertisers (emotion)and engineers like Warden can develop data-trawling engines to collect getatable information across a massive dataset.The LAW needs to be much clearer about the rights of consumers, companies and advertisers in these situations. As Facebook is presumably bound by its own set of critically con sidered ETHICAL guidelines, these are neverthess underpinned by commercialised VALUES and a vested interest (emotion) in keeping the data of its users from competitors. Warden claims to be operating under his own set of ethics that privilege (value) the furthering of knowledge. The discern then shifts to the academic community. Warden contends that one of his central motivations for collecting this data was sothat he could share it with the academic community.Although this claim may be true, most (if not, all) Universities have clear ETHICAL guidelines for research that explicitly VALUE and because require consent from participants. If none of the users gave consent for their data to be collected in this way, this in effect denies them a sense of AGENCY. Thus, academically, this data is tainted. sequence its implications are important the trends it makes visible are crucial to understanding the place structures of social network sites like Facebook.Personally, I wouldbelieve pe ople should be able to tick a box that gives consent for the use of their own(prenominal) material. I do not believe, either, that it should be one of those boxes you are obligate to tick before being able to use a site that removes my personal AGENCY and I VALUE this very much. It should be up to me to decide whether other people get my data.If this sort of system was in place, everyone would know the FACTS, everyone would understand what is going on and no one would feel (emotion) betrayed or exposed unfairly. (463 words) Animal Research Link http//www. scu. edu/ethics/publications/iie/v1n3/cures. hypertext markup language Objective summary