FRANCISCO, Emmanuel Cleto O.

BSIT-S-T-3A-T

April 25, 2024

INSIGHT ABOUT SOCIAL ETHICS

Did you know that the most significant factor that affects someone’s ethical behavior is their cultural and societal norms. There are a lot of issues where social ethics could be applied like, income inequalities, healthcare access, data privacy, misinformation and many more. Among these different issues, I would like to focus on the social ethics regarding data privacy and confidentiality. Nowadays, social media is the most common thing for everyone. Almost everyone has an account or two on their preferred social media apps. However, people tend to be a bit too transparent about their lives while using these apps and some people tend to use this information in some malicious ways. Posting your every move, life happenings, personal information or sometimes your current location could lead to more dangerous scenarios when the wrong kind of people get a hold of this information. These dangers could be harmful online or in a worst case scenario it could be dangerous physically. Some might expose your private information or hack your accounts while others could potentially harm you or steal your belongings. I personally have some experience with these dangers, one of my accounts was hacked and stole some of my data. This account was connected to various different accounts since it was linked to them and basically a lot of my linked account was also lost during this attack. I recovered some of these accounts with the help of customer service but regrettably I also lost some of them permanently causing some of my time and efforts to those accounts to be lost forever. I was a bit lucky since the attacker didn’t use my account to destroy my image online. But for some people, they were victims of attackers who used their identity to share malicious posts or do things that could destroy their reputation. This data privacy isn’t limited to attackers but could also be applied to the big companies who collect, store and process their user’s data and information. Though these companies normally ask for their user’s consent regarding the data management when users register to their platforms. By giving consent to these terms and conditions the users give the companies the right to process

their data or possibly sell them. Though there is another ethical issue regarding these

consents, there is a law called “digital age of consent” where children under the age of

16 needs a parental consent for processing their data. To be honest this digital age of

consent is probably often overlooked since people don’t usually suspect that their data

would be stolen or sold. Also, nowadays almost all children uses the social media even

without their parent’s consent or permission. Consent is a very powerful action since

this means that you voluntarily agree to the other party’s proposal or desires. There is

also an informed consent where you agree while knowing the procedures, possible

consequences and risks involved. These are what the terms and conditions are for it

states the procedures and risks involved when using an application. There is a study

that conducted a social experiment to find out if the users actually read the terms and conditions. The result was only 1% of the users read the terms and conditions. From

this most people don’t actually know what are the risks involved while using their

applications. They blindy gave their consents to process their data without knowing

what possibly could happen. This is ethically concerning when knowing that a lot of

children are in possible risk because they still don’t have much knowledge about the

consequences of their actions online. At the same time this is difficult to change

because social media is widely used and its main purpose is to primarily share

information.

There are a lot of social ethical issues that could be connected to social media

since it also promotes globalization. Globalization is the interconnectedness of the

world’s different cultures and economies. As I said before the ethical behavior of an

individual is greatly influenced by their cultural and societal norms. So when different

people of different cultures meet some actions of one person could be considered rude

to the other person. This could result to discrimination or racism and this usually

happens in social media. People has the freedom of saying anything in social media. They

could say a lot of discrimination towards different people with other cultures

without any real consequence. There are a lot of people who suffers from discrimination

which could probably affect their real lives. These are only few of the many social

ethical problems that the world is currently experiencing.

References:

Barrett-Maitland, N., & Lynch, J. (2020). Social Media, Ethics and the Privacy Paradox.

In www.intechopen.com. IntechOpen. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/70973

Hanlon, A., & Jones, K. (2023). Ethical concerns about social media privacy policies: do users have the ability to comprehend their consent actions? Journal of Strategic Marketing, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965254x.2023.2232817

American Psychological Association. (2022, November). Racism, bias, and Discrimination. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/racism-bias-discrimination

Do we actually agree to these terms and conditions? – Data Science W231 | Behind the Data: Humans and Values. (2021, July 9).

https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/w231/2021/07/09/do-we-actually-agree-to-these-terms-and-conditions/#:~:text=In%20fact%20a%202017%20study