Topic 4: Reflective Summary of Ethical Issues

I found topic 4 the most interesting topic because it was open to any ethical issue about the educational or business use of social media. After doing some research, the processing and selling of our data by social media organisations to the third party companies cought my attention to be discussed for topic 4. I found it interesting because although any social media that we use such as Facebook may state in their terms and condition but almost half of the users are not aware of their personal data being commercialised as no one bothers to read all those endless terms and conditions.

Reading others student also broaden my knowledge about other ethical issues. I found Bartosz’s blog similar to my topic as he was discussing how our data used by Massive Online Open Courses. It was surprising for me that despite I am a member of MOOC myself I never knew that they also make money from selling the data generated from activities of their members, which make them no different to what social media do to our data. I really liked his blog but I didn’t agree with him saying the effect of MOOC selling our data will put bad light on some users.  I didn’t agree because all online courses users profiles contains formal academic posts and activities that may not empress some employers for recruitment but it doesn’t put bad light on anyone.

Aliyu also made a really good post about issues of social media effect in the workplace. I liked his examples of some employees losing their jobs because of a small post. It concered me that while freedom of speech gives the right to everyone expressing their openions, then why the action of employers sacking thier emoloyees not considered to be agained the freedom of speech law and why are they not getting sued?

Comments

https://paszcza.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/how-mooc-platforms-use-our-data/

https://aaaliyu.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/topic-4-ethical-issues-of-social-media-in-the-workplace/

The Ethical issue of mass data gathering and targeted adverts

More than half of the social media users still have the question of what is the source of income for social media sites such as Facebook, which is especially popular among people? Surely we don’t pay monthly subscription for the social network sites we use or neither we make one off payment to them. So how do they benefit from us? Well the answer is that we don’t pay by debit card or money in cash, but we all pay them by the personalize data we input individually.

As we use social media for our personal or career purposes over the months and years we make a unique path which is consists of who we connected with, what have we share, what is our interests, hobbies, age, place of living and other activities. This uniqueness is treated as a product wich can be sold to other commercial organizations or can be targeted for advertisement [1].

Social media companies such as Facebook analyse billions of these unique load of data that is gathered from every individual, to spot any trend into the analysed data and react to it based on their own advantages, such as targeted advertisement to every single user based on their interests and experiences [1].

Here is a lecture from Beverly Mays on how different social sites gather personal data and how they use them.

Data also collected using cookies. Cookies are data that are saved locally in the users device, and they are used for smart browsing.

The main discussion for this topic is the significant bounce effect of these data gathering to the users who provided these mass data. The main advantages it brings to the users is that it enables them to be known online, users see only adverts that they interested in, individual can be targeted for recruitment by organisations, also it provides smart browsing which saves users a lot of time.

Despite that it has many advantages to the user, it has also raised the issue of exceeding the users privacy, many of us don’t agree for our data to be used by third party organizations, however social media sites such as Facebook do sell our personalized data to other companies without even many of us being aware of. Until a couple of years ago websites also used to access users cookies without their permission, however since then cookies law invented to make users aware that their data (cookies) being accessed [2].

References

[1] http://www.simplyzesty.com/Blog/Article/August-2012/The-Rise-Of-Big-Data-And-How-Social-Media-Uses-It

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters

[3] youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPJ4bHvyZwU&w=560&h=315