Question

In several paragraphs, please answer the following case study question to the best of your ability.

In answering these case study questions, students are reminded that they need to refer to ethical theories (Bentham, Mill, Kant, Rawls, and Aristotle) and inherent values (Life, Happiness, Equal Worth and Autonomy) to justify their answers. They may also refer to specific articles we have read and discussed in class.

You work at a small tech company that is creating an app that would allow people to share pictures, notes, videos and thoughts with their very close friends and family. The app is built around the concept of Facebook, but geared towards private, intimate sharing. The idea is to market the app as something like Facebook that allows you to maintain meaningful personal connections with close family and friends. Rather than having hundreds or even thousands of people privy to your information, this app would allow you to share with a handful of those people whom you are closest to.

Currently, the app is being given away for free on all the major app distributions sites (Google Play, the Istore, etc.) The app is advertised as personal and secret. And it is growing in popularity. People seem to love the idea of having a private way to communicate with a close-knit group securely and safely. You feel proud of the work you are doing allowing people to maintain strong personal connections across vast distances.

However, one of your very close friends has refused to download the app. At first you were stunned as to why they resisted doing so, and a bit hurt that they didn’t want to have this close personal connection with you. Your friend explained that they had carefully read all the terms and conditions attached to the app, and noted that it was far from secret. The data people shared with their intimate friends using the app was being collected and sold to various advertising and market research companies. This is why the app was able to be given away for free. Your whole livelihood, in other words, has rested on the mining of data that people likely believe to be secret and private.

You dismiss your friend as too worried about this at first. After all, the data is stripped of any identifying features before it is sold. It’s not as though a name and email address were attached. The data is mostly just following trends such as location, word usage, number of close personal friends, etc. But as time goes by, you find yourself worrying more and more about the way the app is marketed. Is it right to market the app as personal and secret? Especially given that everything that is posted might be sold to another company? On the other hand, the Terms and Conditions do state clearly that this is what happens to user data. So if someone chooses to download the app, isn’t that their informed choice? But you know that most people don’t read the Terms and Conditions closely.

What should you do?

please make it plagiarism free.it worth 10 marks

Answer 1

In my opinion to address the situation mentioned above it is essential to understand the concerns and need for security and confidentiality of customer base who would use my newly developed application with the impression of being safe as it is meant for sharing information with close contacts. So irrespective of whether they are using it with or without the informed choice about their posts being sold to other companies it is still the matter of privacy of people which shouldn't be left just upto the informed choice based on terms and conditions which people rarely go through.

Moreover even of using the app becomes the informed choice of the people, it is still a fact that they would be using it with the impression of being more secure than any other social platform. So as per the ethical theories provided by Aristotle, Kant, Rawl and Mill it might price inappropriate to give an impression about app to people which it is not keeping up with. I thus show explicitly mention about all the loop holes or privacy issues with the app so that my customers do not rely on it extensively which might hurt their autonomy and violate their right for maintaining confidentiality or privacy. Moreover as per the ethical theories this act cannot be considered moral because it involves the risk of exposure to confidentiality of people which should not be acceptable.

For ensuring that my customers using this app are happy and feel secure, I need to either fix the loop hole and increase the barriers so that external sources do not access the app information or customer posts and thus increase the privacy of app or I need to reflect on this issue so that people using this app are aware about the risks involved.

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Thanks dear student.. I assure you of no plagiarism.. Good luck.. Rate if satisfied :)