Ethics paper 2

Paper 2: Facebook

Due: Wed night, Dec 1. Your paper must be submitted electronically, either via email or through the Blackboard digital dropbox.

Discuss the ethical obligations of a commercial service like Facebook to its user community regarding privacy. Obviously, at some level users have the right to reveal whatever they wish about themselves. However, there should still be some general limits. Try to focus on arguments that would make sense in the business world, and possibly even within Facebook, recognizing that Facebook is an advertiser-supported service and that user participation in Facebook is never mandatory. Specifically, consider some of the following:

The information itself

Whether there are any ethical limits on what Facebook can require to be world-viewable (currently this includes your name, picture, location, and a few other basics).
Whether there are or should be expectations on what can be world-viewable by default, even if a mechanism is provided to make access more restrictive.
Whether "network-viewable" (eg viewable by all of Loyola) should be treated as similar to world-viewable, or more similar to friends-only.

Changes in privacy policy

What should happen whenFacebook wants to change its privacy policies. Should new consent always be required? Before continuing to use Facebook (when there is enormous pressure to click "yes" just to write on your wall), or should the permission be less "intrusive" than that? Note that different consent rules might be needed for different kinds of changes.
How much explanation does Facebook owe its users as to the potential consequences of certain privacy changes?
Are users entitled to be able to turn off some new feature (eg mini-feeds, below)? Or is Facebook within its rights to say, "this is the new feature; take it or delete your account"?

Sharing with third parties

What rules and expectations should be in place for Facebook to share information with third parties. Note that third parties likely have their own privacy policies you may not know about. (Last weekend when I read theonion.com, there was a box in the lower right listing what my FB friends all thought of various Onion articles.)
What kind of information can be given to advertisers indirectly. Note that Facebook provides no user privacy controls here.

As far as advertising, I regularly get ads about car insurance for "men in their 50's". However, that does not mean Facebook has turned over my gender or age to advertisers; it may simply be that advertisers create specific ads for specific groups, and I was shown the ad that was requested to be shown only to "men in their 50's", for example. Alternatively, ads might contain scripting variables such as &age, &state, etc; the variables would then be filled in by Facebook when the ad is run. If these are the kinds of things Facebook is doing, are there still some privacy concerns? What notice should users be entitled to? Should users be able to restrict access to personal information by advertisers? Does Facebook owe its users an explanation here?

Special information collected

Note that Facebook gathers information, as well as storing user-supplied information. Here are some examples of potentially very sensitive material

Facebook (unlike conventional websites) knows who is viewing each page. Facebook has the capability to add a feature that lets the page owner see what other Facebook users have viewed his or her page/info/photos/etc in the recent past. Such information could highlight which friends had an obsessive and/or romantic interest in the owner. Should other users be able to opt out? How far back should the information be made available? Is there a legitimate expectation that we can browse anonymously?
Facebook sometimes has is the location from which the posting was made, either through IP geolocation or through smart phones that supply GPS information.
Facebook "private" messaging is used by many as email; both the message contents and the list of frequent correspondents are potentially sensitive.

When making ethical arguments in a business context, it is often helpful to recognize that ethical behavior can be closely tied to a business's own long-term self-interest. That is, Facebook would wish to avoid alienating its user base, and also would wish to avoid unforeseen liabilities.

While information visible to everyone would thus be visible to advertisers too, which might be one of Facebook's goals, be aware that Facebook also has other reasons for wanting to share user information with everyone. For example, Facebook is interested in growing its service, and to that end it is important to make publicly available as much information as possible that allows people to find friends.

As an example of past Facebook privacy issues, one of Facebook's earliest controversial decisions was the creation of "mini-feeds", a mechanism that notifies you whenever any of your Friends updates his or her page. Today, this feature is widely accepted as reasonable, but see the analysis in the sidebar on page 55 of Baase.

Your paper will be graded primarily on organization (that is, how you lay out your sequence of paragraphs), focus (that is, whether you stick to the topic), and the nature and completeness of your arguments.

It is essential that all material from other sources be enclosed in quotation marks (or set off as a block quote), and preferably with a citation to the original source as well.

Expected length: 3-5 pages (600+ words)