Information Technology Ethics Exposing Private

Questions: 1. What's going on? 2. What are the facts? 3. What are the issues? 4. Who is affected? 5. What are the ethical issues and their implications? 6. What could have been done about it? 7. What are the options? 8. Which option is the best and why? Answer: 1. From the case study it is found that Facebook has an ethical issue regarding the privacy of the peoples using the social service. According to Hern (2016) is has been found that the user information of the Facebook profile of a person is chipped away and the privacy of the user is at risk. The users have no knowledge about their data being exposed without the permission of the user. Facebook is providing update to its user and constantly evolving its social networking site with addition of new features (Wodzicki et al., 2012). New searching techniques are applied to the site and the search engines that are introduced have the permission to access the user profile without any consent from the user. There are no possible settings available to the user to restrict the unauthorized access of the personal information. 2. The main fact associated with the case study is the risk in privacy of the Facebook users. The case study that is chosen for the essay discusses about the problem face by a person using the social site Facebook. The affected person in the case study previously had a Facebook profile in 2014 but she deleted the account for some personal reasons (Hern, 2016). But she needed an account in Facebook for some workings and again opened an account with minimum personal information (Hern, 2016). She needed to keep all the informations in her account private and avoid people to find her account but in spite of that her colleges and school friends were able to find her. She also found that some peoples were also able to the posts, photos and status messages without her consent. She thus understood that Facebook have the access to all the personal information that are shown private in her profile. 3. There are some ethical and un-ethical issues from the victims view point found in the case study. In spite of the fact that the case study is written on a specific Facebook account but this is the common problem face by most of the Facebook users. The issue is ethical for Facebook because this is a social networking site built to connect the users and providing suggestions for making friends (Slade Prinsloo, 2013). The unethical issue regarding Facebook is that the individual points of interest get getting investigated before everybody without the readiness of the clients. The private data of the person is also a part of Facebook (Vitak, 2012). As indicated in the case study the major untrustworthy issue is this it controls the protection of the framework and shockingly the individual information are getting shared to the other Facebook users. 4. In the specific story of the case study the affected person is Alex Hern Facebook user. In spite of the fact that here in the case study there is one victim but this issue is common to most of the Facebook users. Security and privacy standout amongst the most critical segment of the social networking sites when the users are sharing their perspective in front of the world (Mohamed Ahmad, 2012). 5. The main ethical issue defined in the case study is regarding the unauthorized access of the personal information of the user. In spite of the fact that the client is not intrigued to share her points of interest but rather because of absence of security and protection rather for general security setting arrangements she will undoubtedly impart her subtle elements to outsiders (Vitak, 2012). It is also found that the identity is misused by others for doing incorrectly works. For example the user information of a person can be used by another person to create a fake profile and do noxious activities on Facebook. 6. Keeping in mind the end goal to determine this issue, more perplexing developing security strategies should be actualized by the Facebook. The customization of the user profile to make the information private should be kept in mind to fight against the ethical issues (Paechter, 2013). The user information under private option should not be available to the other Facebook users only. Aside from this, there are many companies developing security softwares and add-ins that can be added to the Facebook page to secure the user information. 7. To address the problems associated with the case study certain rules and regulations can be applied. This would help in mitigating the privacy issue and new technologies can also be applied to the site that would keep the personal data encrypted (Mazzia et al., 2012). Decentralization of the personal data of the user and using third party friendly search engines can also resolve the issue. The user data can be encrypted and the unauthorized access of the data can be stopped using cryptographic tools (Mohamed Ahmad, 2012). The data could be only accessed by the user and he can set permission for who else can access it. 8. I think the best option to mitigate the risk associated with the privacy of Facebook is encryption of the private information of the user. There are many third party software that can be integrated with Facebook to encrypt the user personal information and the user can only have the access to his data. The user can give privilege to his friends or friends of friends access the authorized data (Madejski et al., 2012). The remaining unauthorized part would be kept secure or private to the user. References Hern, A. (2016). Facebook is chipping away at privacy and my profile has been exposed. the Guardian. Retrieved 13 August 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-privacy-secret-profile-exposed Madejski, M., Johnson, M., Bellovin, S. M. (2012, March). A study of privacy settings errors in an online social network. InPervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2012 IEEE International Conference on(pp. 340-345). IEEE. Mazzia, A., LeFevre, K., Adar, E. (2012, July). The PViz comprehension tool for social network privacy settings. InProceedings of the Eighth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security(p. 13). ACM. Mohamed, N., Ahmad, I. H. (2012). Information privacy concerns, antecedents and privacy measure use in social networking sites: Evidence from Malaysia.Computers in Human Behavior,28(6), 2366-2375. Paechter, C. (2013). Researching sensitive issues online: implications of a hybrid insider/outsider position in a retrospective ethnographic study.Qualitative Research,13(1), 71-86. Slade, S., Prinsloo, P. (2013). Learning analytics ethical issues and dilemmas.American Behavioral Scientist,57(10), 1510-1529. Vitak, J. (2012). The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures.Journal of Broadcasting Electronic Media,56(4), 451-470. Wodzicki, K., Schwmmlein, E., Moskaliuk, J. (2012). Actually, I wanted to learn: study-related knowledge exchange on social networking sites.The Internet and Higher Education,15(1), 9-14.