Privacy Concerns in Social Media †Free Samples to Students

Question: Discuss about the Privacy Concerns in Social Media. Answer: Introduction: Social media is one of the biggest phenomena in the 21st century. Since its arrival in early 2000s, the social media had casted significant impact on the daily lives of people. All these social media requires to create a virtual profile of the individuals that becomes an identity and to make these profiles, people need to give some of their personal information. Hence, massive amount of personal information become available to the social media companies and increased the risk of security breaching. For example, seven Middle East countries have changed the usage of social media due to privacy concerns, and the rank of the countries are made based on the highest to least usage of social media: UAE (41%), Qatar (33%), KSA (26%), Jordan (24%), Egypt (19%), Tunisia (16%) and Lebanon (14%) (Al - Kuwari 2018). This privacy concern brings to the ethical question of whether the social media companies should be able to collect personal information of users. Significance of the ethical question As the social media has invaded into the lives of millions of people, there is availability of huge amount of personal details on the cloud. Digital banking and shopping have made people to divulge some of their financial details on the internet, which is closely linked with personal IDs or specific details. Hence, invasion into the personal information possess a risk of identity theft or financial loss for the users, if not handled sensitively. Thus, the ethical question of whether the social media companies should be allowed to collect the personal data of the users is valid and significant. The biggest disadvantage of social media getting access to personal information of users is the identity theft and fraud. According to a report by BBC News (2016), it is found that in 2015, there were 148,000 victims of identity theft compared to 94,500 in 2014 in the UK. 261 companies reported that the fraudsters collected the data from the social media companies. The marketers have collaborated with the social media companies as their promotional strategy. They have linked their apps with the social media sites and people have to connect with the same profile used in social media (DeMers 2017). This makes the companies easier to collect the personal data of the user and based on the searches, they throw up product suggestions. This enables virus threat and spamming and many such companies use the content such as, images, illegally for their own purpose (Cohen 2017). Data brokering firms collect personal data illegally from social sites and sell those data to marketing companies. Acxiom made $1.1 billion from sales of data of 144 million households in 2011 (Morris and Lavandera 2012). The SSN breach in the USA in 2017 affected around 143 million US based people, as the hackers collected the very crucial SSN numbers of people along with their personal information through social media, and Yahoo made a record of having 1 billion hacked accounts (Hautala and Nieva 2016). Cambridge Analytica - Facebook controversy divulged that the company misused personal data of 50 million American users of Facebook in 2016 (Grassegger and Krogerus 2017) Assumptions to fill the gap in the publicly available information Social media sites should know their limit in invasion into the privacy and collect personal data of the users These sites should know whom to share with the personal information of the users so that data protection rules are not violated. Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics, which states that an action is the best when it maximizes the utility. The term utility includes many things that enhance the well being of the individuals. According to this theory, utility is maximized when anyone involved in the action is not harmed (de Lazari-Radek and Singer 2017). Act utilitarianism refers to the selection of the actions meant for maximizing the utility, based on their likely outcomes. It states that an action of an individual is morally right if it produces the best possible outcome for the specific situation (Luetge, Armbrster and Mller 2016). Regarding the ethical question of the topic, the consequences of the issue can be analyzed by implementing the act utilitarianism theory. Positive consequences Social media helps the product companies to know the market trend by analyzing the tastes and preferences of the users from their search history (Tuten and Solomon 2017). It helps to gather important information about the people, who get affected in case of any accident or natural disasters and provide aid to them in an emergency basis. The sites help the customers to build a group or relationship with many others having a similar nature, passion or taste by showing the suggestions of social groups. Negative consequences There are hidden data hacking apps when the external websites create an association with the social media site and allure the users to click on their app or advertisement. The login page asks for permission to access the users personal data from their social media profile. However, the users do not know where the data is going. These incidents lead to data hacking and misusing of data (Al-Kuwari 2018). When a social movement is started through social media, the government can take actions on the involved individuals by collecting the personal information from the social media, which they should not divulge to anyone at any cost. The marketers disturb the users by making telephonic calls offering products and services and they get the personal information, such as, phone number, email etc from the social media. Ethical conclusion The ethical consideration, regarding the matter of social media collecting personal data of users, has both positive and negative consequences. However, by comparing the impacts, it can be said that, as people are becoming increasingly dependent on internet, including banking, the privacy concerns are increasing too. Identity theft and resulting financial loss is a big issue for every individual and hence, data protection laws should be followed strictly. There should be informed consent from the users before collecting the data for any purpose and also divulging those to any type of marketers. With these measures enforced, the net utility of the society will increase. References Al-Kuwari, A., 2018, March. Privacy Concerns in Social Media. InQatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings(Vol. 2018, No. 4, p. SSAHPD1103). Qatar: HBKU Press. BBC News, 2016.ID thieves 'hunting' on social media. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36701297 [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018]. Cohen, S., 2016.Privacy Risk with Social Media. [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-cohen/privacy-risk-with-social-_b_13006700.html [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018]. de Lazari-Radek, K. and Singer, P., 2017.Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. DeMers, J., 2017.Does Your Social Media App Know Too Much About You?. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/01/23/does-your-social-media-app-know-too-much-about-you/2/#125ee2a6534e [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018]. Grassegger, H. and Krogerus, M., 2017. The data that turned the world upside down.Vice Magazine, January,30. Hautala, L. and Nieva, R., 2016.Yahoo sets hack record at 1 billion accounts. [online] CNET. Available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-hack-1-billion-users-affected-2013-record/ [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018]. Luetge, C., Armbrster, T. and Mller, J., 2016. Order ethics: Bridging the gap between contractarianism and business ethics.Journal of Business Ethics,136(4), pp.687-697. Morris, J. and Lavandera, E., 2012.Why big companies buy, sell your data. [online] CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/23/tech/web/big-data-acxiom/index.html [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018]. Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017.Social media marketing. Sage.