Facebook Stalking
This week in class we spoke about how ethic standards are set in place with an ever evolving world of technology we live in today. specifically with the article “Big Data, Ethical Futures” by Mary L Gary, it spoke about the ethical dilemma in collecting people’s data. If you are familiar with Facebook you probably know how easy it is to look at other people’s pictures and before you know it you’re three years deep into the girlfriend’s mother’s sister’s wedding pictures of the person you originally started observing. I think it is safe to say that millennials expect this to happen pretty frequently, but for whatever reason we are a little uneasy when we hear that Facebook is monitoring us. In the article Facebook performed an experiment where they purposely allowed some users to mostly view sad posts and other users to view mainly happy posts. With this, a debate was started on what is considered private and unusable content. Should people be comfortable with having their public information used for internet research or should people have a right to know when they are in an online experiment and be allowed to accept or decline participation? Also, should users of social media abide by these evolving ethics standards because when we look at memes involving comments, pictures, videos, and other personal content that people have posted that ended up going viral, most people are not ready to take the “offender” to the ethics board. Technology and the internet are complicated and complex, which makes these issues complicated as well, so coming to a standard conclusion to internet ethics will be very challenging, if not, impossible.
