Paper 2: Facebook
Due: Thursday night, June 24. 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.
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
- 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.
- What sort of user consent should be required for changes to
Facebook's privacy policies. Note that different consent rules might be
needed for different kinds of changes.
- 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.
- What kind of information can be given to advertisers indirectly. Note that Facebook provides no user privacy controls here.
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, 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 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.
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 variables such as &age,
&state, etc; the variables would then be filled in by Facebook when
the ad is run (perhaps with some simple scripting as well). 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?
Finally, note that Facebook gathers information itself, as well as
storing user-supplied information. As one example of potentially very
sensitive material, note that Facebook (unlike conventional websites)
knows who is viewing each
page. Suppose Facebook
were 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?
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)