Business ethics: social media and business
- ethics_has_me_spaced
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Business ethics: social media and business
- Sy Borg
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
Testing a few privacy thresholds:
1. Would you be happy in a transparent house or bathroom walls?
2. Would you be happy for men to have an easy view into your young daughter's bedroom window? By the logic of the OP - is that doing her a harm?
3. To what extent would you be happy to have your medical records, business dealings or personal conversations open to anyone?
At this point we still physically need privacy; being under surveillance is stressful, but the type and degree varies from individual to individual. It's our physiology. Staring is an act of aggression in nature and being under surveillance is the technological equivalent to being stared at, so it is stressful. Certainly much stress has been reported by workers under strong and constant surveillance. You can't even pick your nose in peace! :shock:
You may also notice that requests for information are unbalanced. What of a little quid pro quo? Companies that disregard personal privacy often do not reciprocate to the public - and you will struggle to find out what percentage tax they paid, or how ethical or competent their decisions. When it comes to privacy and the sharing of information, it is ideally be reciprocal but in truth reflects power structures.
So individuals are becoming ever more transparent as institutional backroom activities become ever more opaque. This reflects the changing priorities of societies - from people to organisations (which people will probably one day call "AI"). Governments now govern for peer institutions, not for individual people. Policies have consistently favoured business over individuals everywhere this century.
Basically, institutions are the new humans and people are the new animals and, increasingly, individuals' privacy needs will be treated with all the seriousness we afford the privacy needs of the animals under our control.
Happy Dystopian Wednesday :)
- LuckyR
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
On LuckyR's point: On the face of it this sounds fair enough. People should realize that when they put some information online they've lost control of it. The trouble is, we're increasingly used to the idea that everything is done online and, because we don't have an infinite amount of time available, we're used to the activity of automatically ticking the "I agree" box associated with the 1000 pages of terms and conditions, when presumably on page 467 it says that all the information we provide now belongs to someone else to distribute as they see fit. Happy ranting Wednesday!
- LuckyR
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
Not anonymous. In fact the citizenry is much more traceable now than at any other time.
- Burning ghost
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
The naivety of "youth culture" today shows how quickly and easily people will expose their personal details online without a second thought. This makes them easy targets for advertisements and harassment. I simple message to your friend or sibling, a harmless photo posted, can lead to all sort of personal information being exposed without you even realizing it.
The biggest shock I had was with mobile phones. Phone companies keep vast records of your location and movement, who you speak to, and can also track the people you speak to. Anyone can hack into this data and sell private data to advertising companies and no doubt we'll see people attacked and bribed left, right and centre. What is worse still is the social system is widely set up to snare people into having e-mails, mobile phones and using social media more and more.
I questioned someone recently who works in advertising about their moral obligations. They steered away from the question wishing only to "inspire people" even though they knew nothing about how their techniques would be used. The creation of bubbles in society of social media is creating more divisions, and now we're seeing corporations invading this space and imposing regulation of internet traffic ... it's looking dark.
The illusion of privacy is a concern as much as the illusion of a society of freedom. Once the national banks collapse (which they will eventually - maybe sooner than later!?) then the "governments" will be more and more puppets of the corporations. The future of "Government" is basically going to be a battle of social media control.
On the bright side of things cryptocurrencies will overwhelm the business field and take away the control of banks, and therefore give some social control over the economy, but the powers that be are trying to backdoor this move by imposing traffic regulation on the internet - they'll effectively shut down freedom of communication and likely strangle the only way out (cryptocurrencies: which are a HUGE threat to the current regime in place.) Regardless, I do see people always bypassing the traffic regulations. An example of this would be attempts to "shutdown" facebook in some countries - its just not viable because people will find away around all the blockades in cyberspace one way or another.
The ethical dilemma is with individuals not wanting to know what is going on in the world, and many people actively encouraging them not to care or using sensationalism to bend the will of the masses behind some warped ideological stance in the name of "freedom" set up to take away the freedom of others ... it is all a bit Orwellian, and there is likely no harder or difficult truth to accept than the famous FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, SLAVERY IS FREEDOM slogan. The best we can do is to rethink what we mean by "freedom" and "slavery" and put these terms to use in order to create human opportunity rather than human regulation.
Interesting times !!
- Sy Borg
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
They say that when the smallest unit of bitcoin - the satoshi - reaches a non-trivial value, that's when it will stop inflating itself to its full size and start being a proper currency. But I still don't have the guts to buy any significant amount of it in case that's not true and it crashes. I seriously considered buying some last year when it was around US$500 per bitcoin. Shoulda woulda coulda.
- Sy Borg
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Re: Business ethics: social media and business
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023