Ethics and the News - Essay Example

Nowadays, according to Rosenblatt (2012), “All of your Facebook activity and data will be available to the advertisers who use the network.” This clearly means a breach of privacy and thus, not only can advertisers use a user’s personal data but this data may be used maliciously by certain people or organizations who either sell illegal products and who can deliberately cause violence or harm towards a particular user or any random user. Indeed, if this is the case then it must be dangerous to even post anything on Facebook since the company might not be able to exactly trace where the information goes and who sees it.

Moreover, there is indeed danger if one freely exposes private information over Facebook for some individuals might use this information for their own malicious motives, not to mention that anyone on Facebook or on any other social networking site might be able to gain access to it by mistake, and may either make fun of such information or “simply know” it without the knowledge and permission of the user. . ??s practice of providing advertising companies with data from its users and shows this to be a rather natural tendency: “Facebook should not be criticized for the fact that it offers…new social plugins” because “the company carefully manages the data-sharing process, and it has made serious efforts to tell users exactly what is going and what they can do about it” (Eldon, 2010).

In fact, based on the report, these privacy issues are without any basis and that these issues are in fact “creating new risks not just for Facebook users, but for the company and its ecosystem of developers and marketers” (Eldon, 2010). The privacy issues might also call the attention of the United States Federal Trade Commission as they might “impose stiff new regulation on what product changes that Facebook can make going forward, thereby limiting its ability to improve its products” (Eldon, 2010).

In short, the report that favors Facebook and tries to exonerate it from the accusations hurled against it concerning privacy issues somehow has three points: first, it is trying to say that such sharing is inevitable since Facebook is a new and developing company; second, it wants to tell the readers that Facebook is in fact doing its best to regulate the flow of data during any process that shares this data; and thirdly, the privacy issues raised by Facebook users in fact is the one that endangers the sense of freedom and privacy that Facebook affords its users.

The reason is that such issues might call the attention of the government and thus monitor Facebook operations more closely. The third point actually discourages people from further hurling accusations against Facebook. According to James Rachels, “[Although] it is possible for people to act altruistically…a person