For this week’s conference, respond to the following:Describe an ethical conundrum found in a magazine or newspaper article, and your own thoughts.Give good citations, of course.
You are welcome to comment on the postings of other students.
Respond to Barun: For this discussion , I have chosen the article “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far” written by Nicholas Confessore in New York Times. Technology brings people from all walks of life together, and Facebook is by far the largest community platform in the world of modern tech. As expected, there are ethical standards set for giant tech companies responsible for hundreds of millions of people. Some of the frowned upon ethical issues that could be identified in tech are a violation of privacy, sharing personal data, and using this data for purposes other than the initial intended usage. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal raised a lot of concerns when the Cambridge employees illegally acquired tens of millions of personal data for Facebook users and were out to sell these psychological profiles to American political campaigns.The Cambridge Analytica scandal violated Facebook users’ privacy and the American election laws, and expectedly, it sparked outrage worldwide, with users wondering how their security on the platform was assured. Consequently, many users deleted their Facebook accounts because of privacy concerns, while Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, faced demands to testify before Congress. At this point, there were also concerns about the relationship between John Bolton and Cambridge Analytica, a political association that seemed to favor President Trump. Schroepfer, the chief tech officer for Facebook, estimated that eighty-seven million Facebook users were affected by the historic data leak.Conclusively, Zuckerberg had to attend several congressional meetings to explain what had happened. He claimed that Facebook was investigating tens of thousands of mobile applications to check for the information that may have been harvested from the Cambridge data leak. When the New York Times interviewed some of the affected Facebook users, they found out that the data collection was done via a lengthy psychological questionnaire hosted by Qualtrics, an online survey company. With the data leak, the privacy of Facebook users was violated, and their response to deleting their accounts was acceptable, primarily because their data was used for political campaigns without consent.ReferenceConfessore, N. (2018). Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cam…
