Ethics and Information as a Commodity
Information has become a commodity. One cannot ignore the debates about information shared online on a personal basis, as well as the more serious situations such as Wikileaks and Bradley Manning.
I find myself conflicted when it comes to these discussions because the question is so much more than what information should be shared and should not be shared and by whom. On one hand, I believe that information should be free and available. While I understand the need to keep classified government documents from the public eye in order to protect the safety of others, part of me has cheered at the efforts of Wikileaks. I have cheered in part because I challenge the motives behind efforts made by any government to “protect” it’s own efforts and population. Consequentially, however, we must ask who specifically is/was affected by the release of said data.
On the other hand, the fact that our level of personal privacy is progressively disintegrating troubles me. The theft or usage of information gleaned from social platforms—often by the platforms themselves—disgusts me when efforts have been made by users to protect that information. Companies say that we voluntarily give them the information and it’s our responsibility to safeguard it. I support that. What I don’t support are the actions taken by these companies to exploit loopholes in order to get what they want in terms of social status by way of data hijacking.
What it comes down to are ethics and ethics applied at both the micro level and the macro level. Should people have the right to know what their government is doing—especially if it involves things such as torture or genocide? I think so. Should people have the right to pilfer through your search history on Google simply because they can gain access to it? I think not. These are two questions of ethical behavior on opposite sides of the spectrum whose answers might mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Ethics and context will forever be at opposition with one another. No matter how much the world would love for life’s happenings to remain black and white, the experience of life itself is subjective and conditional. In terms of the transfer and distribution of information, should we not be questioning the factors and environment of a given scenario before passing judgment? Why then do we fail to do this more oft than not?
Privacy, social media, and Google
Sometimes we keep our social profiles separate for very valid reasons and social media platforms—or technology companies—shouldn’t circumvent those efforts as a means of upping their own social capital value or out of some need to be more “socially-connected.”
What I post and the reasons behind what I post to Twitter are entirely different than what I post to Facebook. What I post to this blog is not always something that I would write about for the paper. Why? Because I have different audiences on every platform and frankly, I have a need for some level of privacy in what has become a very public world. What a novel idea.
Privacy on many of these sites continues to be a point of discussion. Whether it’s utilizing a secured url for login pages on Facebook or Twitter or having the ability to turn off the friendly little cookies that allow you to comment via your Facebook page about articles, videos, and whatever other schlock you might be looking at, privacy is important. People don’t like their information being rifled through—no matter what’s its being used for or not being used for.
Google is the latest to initiate a new “social feature” without being upfront. I run a search on Google this evening and guess what pops up?
When signed into Google, the platform automatically searches for public profiles on social networks that might match yours and it does this without asking your permission to do so first. Doesn’t this sound a little bit like the passive privacy adjustments Facebook’s been crucified for in the past? My Twitter profile is public at this point, but I make a point of privatizing other profiles that I have for the purpose of filtering audiences. I’ve made a point of disallowing Google to keep track of my search history. I’ve now made a point of barring Google from searching for profiles to “connect” to my Google account. I did these things to maintain that minuscule level of privacy that I’d like to keep without having to completely take everything down.
This isn’t really so much about Google, though. This is about the fact that the concept of privacy has gone away. Not only is it not given most of the time, but increasingly it’s assumed that no one really wants any privacy. We know that we’ve given you our information. We’ve utilized the tools you’ve given us to keep confidential what we deem necessary. How dare you thumb your nose at us in order to get what you want. What happened to personal and professional ethics?