Running Head: ETHICAL DECISIONS ORGANIZER 1

Ethical Decision Organizer

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The ethical question for this situation is whether Facebook was right to access people's

personal information. Facebook had access to people's information as they were asking their

users to give permissions to other applications, and Facebook terms were used for them to

acknowledge that their allies could get hold of their information. The situation of Facebook

involves some essential human goods which are being put under threat. These human goods are

the personal data that are being shared across additional parties to use in other ways without their

consent. This information was used to help Donald Trump campaign as well as sway voters

during the election period (Tuttle, 2018). The decision made to collect people's data without their

approval should cause damage to them. The kind of harm they are exposed to is other people

using this data for their selfish gains. This situation at Facebook does not presume any

considerations of human rights. It violates the right to privacy, which entails that people's data

should be protected from public investigation.

It would of an added advantage to know if Facebook dealt with the issue as a data breach

or a bug. Well, they discovered that it was not a bug. Instead, the application programming

interface used their ways to get hold of information on the firm's database. Hence, there was no

breach of personal data or Facebook's security system (Tuttle, 2018). One can be able to learn

more about this situation by reading into the case and trying to comprehend how Facebook

addressed this occurrence in its company. Some of the questions that I have about this topic is

whether there can be a future incident of the same. In case there is another similar case of them

exposing people's personal information without their knowledge, how will they be sure that it

will be used for useful purposes.

The key stakeholders of Facebook are Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Jan Koum,

Sherly Sandberg, and Michael Schroepfer (Cho, Furey, and Mohr, 2017). Mark Zuckerberg is
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the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook. He came up with the idea of this social media platform

while he was in his dorm room at Harvard. Eduardo Saverin is a Brazilian businessman as well

as a Facebook stockholder who was also taking part as one of the founding members of this

social platform. He was once in charge of the business department of Facebook. Jan Koum was

among the board of managers in the Facebook company. Sherly Sandberg is the chief operating

officer at Facebook sine 2008. Lastly, we have Michael Schroepfer, who is the chief technology

officer at Facebook. The most important thing to them is that the company continues to generate

more income as well as serving people well.

Some of the options Facebook can use to fix the problem of privacy are providing various

tools so that people can control their privacy settings and stop distributing information about

political bias with third parties. Facebook should also limit the sharing of data with other

applications, and they should halt the straight sharing of information about users' likes,

comments, posts, among many others with a third-social application (Millier, 2018). Lastly,

Facebook should in a position to provide a transparent process to survey and accept applications

that need the personal information for identification purposes. The advantage of Facebook

providing some tools for people to control their settings is that users will be able to know which

applications have access to their data. However, the disadvantage is that most people lack the

technical acuity to maneuver these settings. It is advantageous to limit the sharing of data with

other platforms as it will reduce the risk of malicious people from gaining this information. The

limitation is that Facebook shares automatically personal information. According to the ethics of

privacy, people have the power to control information about themselves. Therefore, I suggest

that Facebook should incorporate more security measures to sure that people's data are not

accessed by others who have malicious intentions.

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Reference

Tuttle, H. (2018). The Facebook scandal raises data privacy concerns. Risk Management, 65(5),

6-9.

Cho, M., Furey, L. D., & Mohr, T. (2017). Communicating corporate social responsibility on

social media: Strategies, stakeholders, and public engagement on corporate Facebook. Business

and professional communication quarterly, 80(1), 52-69.

Millier, S. L. (2018). Facebook Frontier: Responding to the Changing Face of Privacy on the

Internet, The. Ky. LJ, 97, 541.