Ethical Role of the Internet - Report Example

Running Header: Internet Student’s Name: Professor’s Name: Corse Title: Date Internet Introduction Internet is one of the greatest life changing technologies in the world. It can be defined as the medium that allows the connection of computers with each other to create the great World Wide Web. This interconnection which simply involves a number of communication devices has highly been responsible for the development of globalization and changing the world forms of communication completely. The growth and the development of internet has eased the life of all people in the world by reducing the distance between individuals, through the provision of a number of instant communication services that include video calls, emailing, and instant messages among others. It has also made it easy for all individuals to access any kind of information from any part of the world which include academic information, and instant news among other benefits. Although internet has a number of advantages, it also causes one or more problems to the world population. This paper focuses on how internet has contributed to ethical debate regarding the information privacy in the world. Internet and Information Privacy Internet has become among the biggest world invented technology that is important to all individuals irrespective of who they are or what they do. The basic idea of developing this technology was information sharing and even now, internet is highly used in sharing information of all kind, in different business sectors and also information involving people’s private lives. The growth and expansion of internet has highly facilitated the extent to which people can share this information, an aspect that has highly enhanced internalization of a number of companies’ in the world. This intensive sharing of information by use of internet media has come along with information sharing security and information privacy. Internet technology contains a number of ethical and social implications which causes concern and debate. Privacy is one of these issues. Internet has highly opened up information sharing in the society but highly reduced the information privacy. Privacy refers to the individual’s right to be free from unreasonable individual intrusions and surveillance. On the other hand, information privacy can be regarded as the right to establish the extent and the time to share the information regarding oneself or one’s business with others. However, privacy can be broadly interpreted an aspect that contributes to the discussion regarding availability and expectations of personal information. However, it has strongly been debated that the individual’s privacy rights must be balances with the society needs to know and also the right of public to know is more supreme as compared to individuals’ privacy rights. This makes it hard to impose satisfactory privacy regulations in the global information sharing world (Prenhall.com, n.d., p. 139). Today, the society is full of a changing technological progression, new products, and technology. With the current progressions, privacy has been applied differently, altered, and transformed. Cyberspace has generated a number of privacy issues which were not relevant in the past. The easy at which information is currently collected has made the public to query the information privacy. According to Meuli and Finn (n.d.), information gathering through search engine is a very pertinent issue due to the type of information that one is able to correct and the ease of gathering this information. The extensive use of internet and the growth of other internet related technologies that include social media have highly threatened the information privacy. Today, it is every easy to investigate about a person without any hassle. Information about people, places, companies, organizations, and regimes is readily available. Moreover, there has been more development of both malicious and well-intended software and electronic devices that can be used to collect even the secured information which is not intended for public eyes or unauthorized individuals. There are a number of electronic communication aspects that have contributed into information privacy problem. One of these aspects is electronic surveillance. Electronic surveillance entails the use of technology to monitor individuals with or without their consent (Mason, 1986). This is done by use of audio recordings, photography, video recording or by use of background software that records all parts of the computer or internet sites accessed by the user. Surveillance technology is used almost everywhere including in big shops such as supermarkets, in big commercial building such as shopping malls, along the streets, in offices and even in private homes. Although surveillance has highly been used to enhance security especially in almost all the provided examples, it is also used maliciously to monitor individuals with intention of getting more information than one would have wished others to know. It is also highly used by employers to monitor employees’ activity with intention of ensuring the maximization of the company’s time. Whichever way the surveillance electronics or software is used, it highly interferes with the privacy of people involved. Information storage and development of databases where particular information can be stored has also highly contributed to information privacy problem. Most countries have established a number of public databases where others can easily source information regarding other individuals if one has the right to access these databases. These databases store information that includes family history, medical history, credit card number social security number, residential place among other personal details. All organizations practically contain full information regarding their current and former employees, their customers, suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders. This creates a great concern on how private is private information in the hands of the third parties. Although most organizations have tried to maintain information security, there have always been cases of interception where the information successfully goes to the hand of unauthorized individuals. Beside this, authorized individuals may be willing to give out information regarding another person at a price. They may also be forced to give this information freely to governmental body especially the security agency via a court order. This makes it hard for any organization to give a maximum assurance of the privacy of the personal information they store in their databases. All these databases storing personal information, including the governmental databases make it easy to access private information about an individual online either using search engines, or accessing the governmental or the organization through an authorized employee or through hacking. The easy accessibility of individual’s personal information has created a risk of identity theft. Identity theft involves stealing and using private information of another individual to acquire their benefits in different public places. The most commonly stolen information include credit card number, social security number, and national identification number among other information with intention getting money from the actual owners bank account or in any other financial organization. This information has also been used by different criminals to break the trail where they leave information or clues that will misdirect the security agency to the actual owner of the information. It is therefore evident that the intensive rate of storing individuals’ information in databases increases the chances of sealing and misusing of that information by malicious individuals. Cookies and spyware are two other features that are used to mine computer users’ information secretly. Websites can effortlessly monitor the behaviours of their customer without their consent or knowledge. Sellers can easily tract customers’ movement using cookies. Cookies in this case are minute data files which are stored and written on the hard disk of a user by a website when the user accesses a site using any browser. Cookies offer information in the pages of visited website that includes passwords, visits date, and items examined. This information is kept in cookies and passed to the company owning the website. This makes it easier for an individual to gather information about other who accesses their sites. Beside this, it is easy to identify the location of the person accessing the site by use of their IP addresses. Therefore, one can also use this information to track the actual location of another individual which is quite insecure. This implies that one can easily make a site and attract traffic for malicious reasons which include causing harm to the users (Buzzle, 2014). Spyware is another intrusive technique which was solely designed to acquire information about another user online or through the internet without their knowledge. Spyware is a minute computer program which just likes its name that spy on important personal information regarding the user and send that information to a different individual without the consent of the user (Muncaster, 2015). Spyware can scrutinize any visited website, unlike cookies which are particular to particular sites. This makes spyware to be more intrusive. Beside this, spyware is malicious software which can be installed unknowingly to the computer when a user click on downloaded software that contains a spyware attached to it (Olumoye, 2013, p. 157). This specifically happens with shareware or freeware. One way that an individual can install spyware in their system is by sharing files that contains spyware attached to them. In this regard, a spyware can be used to monitor the entire organization network reporting details to the receiver on the other end. This makes it easy for an intruder to access the system without much effort and compromise the privacy of the organization or individual’s information. Although spyware were created with a positive intention of monitoring workers, it is currently sued to assist hackers to access important systems and tamper with their information or even commit fraud in financial institutions. This is a clear indication that it is becoming extremely hard to ensure information privacy once the information is set available via the internet. Information privacy can also be tampered with by compromising the network system of an organization. Security has been one of the greatest problems that organizations have to handle. The fact that information value is growing on daily basis makes information among the highly targeted organizations’ assets in the competitive world. Competing companies are working day and night to ensure that they know the secret behind their competitors’ success (George, 2015). This has made most organizations to go to extend of sending mores to be hired in their competing organization just to get information. The growth of internet and information sharing technology has given these organizations a greater opportunity of stealing information from their competitor and using this information to counter the measures of their competitors. This can be done by stealing system information using any possible means and use it to access the company’s system or by use of backdoors. Back door is a technique used to access a computer system where by an individual bypasses the security measures employed. This can be enhanced especially during programming where the system designer leaves a loophole where he or she can later use to access the system even after the handover. This demonstrates how hard it is to ensure the information security. The urge for individuals to acquire information of other individuals or organization has clearly pushed them into going an extra mile to acquire this information from the systems where they are stored. Although the institution storing this information do it with a good intentions of enhancing their functionality, the security issues in the internet systems challenges their good intention. This open up the debate of how safe it is to have information shared via internet. Before the establishment of the internet technology, it was easy for any organization or individuals to keep their information private and to maintain the status of the information until they are willing to share the information with another person (Britz, n.d). However, things have currently changed and the rate at which private information is going public is quite alarming. The growth of internet technology has come hand in hand with the growth of social networks and need for sharing any piece of information about life events. This has made it had for organizations to choose what should go public and what should rather remain unknown to the public. Employees are increasingly posting information that would rather remain within the organization to the social media immediately after it has taken place. The tradition of broadcasting company’s information via the public relation office to safeguard the company’s image is no more. This has highly affected the information privacy of an organization, an aspect that has highly eased the competitors’ efforts to gather private information regarding a company. Similarly, personal information is easily getting into the media without the owner’s consent. Today, it is easy for an individual to broadcast private information regarding another person over the internet (Lynch, 1994). This has commonly happened with private videos taken between lovers when things go sore. Ex-lovers, especially celebrity are currently experiencing threats of defame as the ability of their enemies to post weird private information that would have preferably remained private has been enhanced by the growth of internet technology. This uncontrolled broadcasting of true or force private information is putting the growth of the internet and the rate of information sharing into a question. The society is currently experiencing an era where by one is completely uncertain of who may be playing around with their private information in the next few minutes. The intensive sharing of information is increasing the rate of crimes and bullying in the society. Individuals can easily get another person’s phone information or home address or even the email address and use that information to disturb the peace of another person. This has increasingly resulted into questioning of the internet technology ethics with regard to information sharing and information privacy. Conclusion The need of information sharing within organization and the need to east information communication resulted to the development of the internet technology in the last few decades. This technology has been very useful to all kinds of organizations in the world. With internet technology, it is currently easy for an organization to share its information within all its branches instantly irrespective of the distances. This has highly enhanced the functionality of different organizations in the world. However, even with all these great advantages, internet growth introduced the issues of information privacy in the world. Initially, no organization was worried about information interception, information stealing secretly via a system or need to employ intensive security measures to safeguard information. However, it is now necessary for any organization to consider the security of their information while sharing it over the internet. With internet, information privacy is never assured. One can get information regarding another person from different databases, from his or her computer, from their websites or from other electronic gadgets installed to mine information. Unlimited information sharing over social media has also highly threatened information privacy. Therefore it is right to conclude that despite of its advantages, internet has highly interfered with information privacy ethics in the society. References Britz, J. J, n.d, ‘Technology as a threat to privacy: ethical challenges to the information profession,’ [online] available at: Read More