Ethics in Social Networking
Computer Sciences and Information Technology
Topic:
EH DQ Week 7
Ethics in Social Networking
With the constant technological advancement, the population is greatly integrated with the internet making it almost impossible to avoid social media. This has rapidly diversified the way of doing things, for instance business where companies use social media to advertise and launch new products. This has been made possible by vast spread of social media resulting from digital migration. According to statistics from the Smart Insight report approximately 3.484 billion people use social media globally. This unprecedented growth in social media usage has prompted a lot of businesses to shift focus to use of social media marketing campaigns (Schaupp, 2019). However, a lot of ethical dilemmas revolving around their modes of information and data collection.
The ultimate goal for every company is to grow and reach out to a broader customer base. For this quest to be possible, understanding their needs and preferences is imperative. Thus, companies gather information and analyze to ascertain their target market .this can be done through, search engines for instance Google, invisible data gathering and other platforms such as YouTube, twitter Facebook among others. A lot of social media users create their user profiles where they share their information publicly. However, data mining and information collection by companies is violation of privacy (Kumlin, 2016). In additional, the use of these unlawfully acquired personal parameters to contact these potential clients is invasive and unethical.
Ethical implications revolving ultimate privacy in social media is a difficult given that social media platforms are meant for sharing information. Unethical use of these platforms have led to privacy breach and potential security issues. Therefore, it is important that organizations and companies define boundaries when it comes it information gathering from their potential clients in order to uphold their ethics while safeguarding the interest of the people (Schaupp, 2019). Social marketing being the newest trend, law and regulations are yet to be enacted to govern the use of social media and protect unsuspecting users from privacy breach while still enjoying the benefits of the platforms.
References
Kumlin, M. (2016). Social media as a tool for corporate reputation management.
Schaupp, L. C., & Carter, L. (2019). Ethics and social networking: An interdisciplinary approach to evaluating online information disclosure. In Cyber Law, Privacy, and Security: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 346-374). IGI Global.
