1. INTRODUCTION
Society is intoxicated with the technology. That is an inevitable truth that plenty of people is aware of, but do not seem to care much about. The fact is that our new technology has much to blame for our human disconnection with our own heritage and culture.
I haven’t been a Facebook user until April 2013. Deep down I knew that the first moment I’ll establish a profile; I’ll lose a real-life contact with friends. And even though I didn’t have my Facebook profile through my whole high school and 75 % of my college (which is more than 7 years comparing to my peers), my life was still full in all aspects. People that wanted to be in touch with me called me or invited me for a coffee, I was being able to attend events that were established on Facebook without clicking “attend” button, and I didn’t missed much if I didn’t see a picture of lunch that one of my Facebook friends published.
However, establishing a Facebook profile in order to stay in touch with all the people I know seemed like the appropriate thing when I realized that I’m going on Erasmus exchange. It took me 5 minutes to sign in, insert my profile photo and my virtual life has boosted. Sharing personal thoughts, pictures and even videos from Prague have become a standard practice for me and before I knew, I become obsessed with it. And what is more, my private life wasn’t private anymore. Checking what’s new every five minutes, going through friend’s profiles over and over again and deciding when to press “like” button has become like a part-time job of my life. Not only that I was doing that when I was in front of my computer, I started doing that through my phone when being outside, on a public transport and even during social events … That’s when I realized I’m highly intoxicated.
The Essay on A Way of Life for Searching People
The book Practicing Our Faith: a Way of Life for a Searching People is about addressing the need for sharing the fundamental needs of man to establish faithful and honorable Christian way of life. It explores twelve central Christian practices contributed together by thirteen individuals coming from diverse denominational and ethnic backgrounds. Specifically this book provides significance to ...
There is an enormous amount of topics to discuss on ethical issues when it comes to technology. However, I’ll focus on fast growing addiction and privacy issues that affect every single one of us when it comes to technology.
2. BUSINESS ETHIC IN TECHNOLOGY
2.1. Privacy Issues
Number of people with access to technology is increasing every day. Because of the large amount of data and information transferred on daily basis, there comes to numerous dangerous threats that affect our security.
It seems every day we learn some new security breach. It is all there for taking on the Internet – more and more sensitive data every second. As for privacy, we Facebook, we Google, we bank online, we shop online and we even invest online. Data is money, and that goes to the core of the browser-security debate. Browser users do not fully appreciate the value of their own data, but the Facebook and Googles of the world certainly do (Grossman et al. 2012).
The social networking phenomenon is consuming the lives of millions of users around the world. Since the inception of the first social networking site, SixDegrees.com in 1997 (Boyd and Ellison 2008), the social networking craze has grown beyond all expectation. The rate of adoption of social networking sites continues to grow as individuals search to become part of virtual community, to share opinion and to connect and socialize with people of similar interest (Chaffey et al. 2009).
Social networking users appear to be comfortable living a part of their lives openly and freely throughout online networks, often oblivious to the risks (Rosenblum 2007).
The fastest growing and the biggest social network Facebook recently reached a milestone of 850 million users. Since the website became a public access model in 2006, the growth of the website has been extraordinary and development has come to a price to the user: a loss of their privacy. The controversy surrounding Facebook’s continued lapses when it comes to ethic has been in the media spotlight in recent months and the topic of privacy on social networking sites has become a worldwide debate.
The Essay on Facebook: mananing your privacy for their profit
1. What concepts in the chapter are illustrated in this case? Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world so it is moving commerce to the internet and Web. In this e-commerce case, the basic construct of ecommerce are illustrated, use of the internet and Web to transact business; digitally enabled transactions. Moreover, this case includes unique features of ecommerce: richness, ...
Although Facebook in its statues expresses that the company will never reveal personal data to any advertiser unless the express agreement between the company and the user, this commitment was violated during the interval between September 2008 and May 2010, when “the User ID of any person who clicked on ad was shared with the advertiser” (Fair 2011).
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner reported Facebook in 2011 because of lack of transparency. The company was requested to revise privacy policy protection for users, because the measures adopted were excessively complex (Facebook 2012).
Despite the efforts to reach a consensus, Facebook refused to change its privacy policies. Although facial recognition contravenes EU legislation, Facebook has not modified its software in order to adjust its use to European laws (Fair 2011).
Facebook does allow people to ‘deactivate’ their accounts. This means that most of their information becomes invisible to other viewers, but it remains on Facebook’s servers – indefinitely. Nevertheless (Fair 2011)., Facebook arrogates to itself the right to change the Privacy Policy conditions without prior warning and without express consent of the Social Network users, even certain information that users had designated as private – like their friend list – was made public under the new policy. The infringement of the users right to privacy has resulted in international complains destined to demand more transparency for personal data appropriation. It has been observed that the contract signed by each user allows Facebook to collect data about people without their knowledge (Tello 2013).
2. 2. Technology Addiction
All emerging technologies has presented exciting and unprecedented possibilities but at the same time raised a wealth of unfamiliar ethical issues. Obsession with new technology, being up to date and always having every single appliance within our reach has damaging consequences.
The Review on Facebook and Social Capital
In what way does Facebook add value to our social capital? Literature review Social networks are a set part of most our daily life’s. Most of us probably also perceive it as beneficial and a positive addition. But do we really use this tool in the most effective way, increasing our social capital - a construct describing the total resources in our networks (Vitak & Ellison 2012)-to the ...
One of the emergent technology-usage related problems that merit research at the individual, organizational and societal level is technology addiction (Block 2008), which is a special type of behavioral, non-substance addiction. And the companies are aware of that. That’s why they often and without our knowledge skillfully exploit its customers. Technology addiction may compromise user’s social life, disrupt emotional functioning, interfere with school, family and work and negatively affect others in the user’s social circle (Block 2008).
However, when habits begin to interfere with daily lives – where one simply can’t do anything else until they’ve had their social media ‘fix’ – then it has become an addiction. It’s completely normal taking about addiction due to statistics (Matsalla 2013) about craving for social media:
• Facebook has 850 million active users, and 488 million of those people use Facebook regularly on their mobile device.
• In 2012, 175 million tweets were sent from Twitter every day. Thirty-two percent of all Internet users use Twitter.
• Instagram had an average of 7.3 million daily active users in 2012, and they averaged 257 minutes accessing the site on their mobile device.
Why is social media so addictive? A recent Harvard University (Yiu Chu 2014) study showed that disclosing personal information activates the same part of the brain that gives pleasure when a person enjoys good food, receiving money or having sex. Although the actual sensation between all of these is different, the study tells one that the human brain considers sharing experiences a pleasurable one – and part of being human is to constantly seek things which gives much pleasure. Social media addicts become addicted not to the actual act of tweeting, friending, poking or posting, rather, they become addicted to the pleasure derived from those actions. That leads to losing time, forgetting about other tasks and even isolation.
Facebook went even further with buying WhatsApp. It’s fundamentally a text-messaging replacement app for mobile phones that lets people send messages to any of their contacts, as long as they know their phone number. Similar to BlackBerry Messenger and iMessage, the service lets users bypass their carrier’s short messages and avoid any texting fees (Pachal 2014).
The Dissertation on Effects of Social Networking Sites
As the world moves into the second decade of the 21 st century, one of the major markers of this era is the rise and use of online communities. In particular, a paradigm called Web 2.0 describes recent technologies that focus on networking mass numbers of individuals into distinct communities over the Internet (O’Reilly, 2007). Social networking sites (SNS) are online communities designed to ...
WhatsApp was the leader among a wave of smartphone-based messaging apps that are now sweeping across North America, Asia and Europe. Although WhatsApp has adhered strictly to its core functionality of mimicking texting, other apps, offer games or even e-commerce on top of their popular messaging features (Gery. 2014).
According to security consultant Bas Bosschert and reporters that first surfaced on Hacker News message forum, it’s possible for others to access your private WhatsApp chats through downloaded Android apps. When people use the app’s built-in backup mechanism – let’s say to prevent losing messages after uninstalling the application or moving them to a new device, WhatsApp, is allegedly using the same encryption code to protect you and everyone else – instead of creating a unique key for each user (Pachal 2014).
This means the backup is going to a database with insecure storage and the chats could potentially be read and stolen by another app. In theory, the developer behind another app could decrypt and ultimately gain access to those messages.
WhatsApp has both offensive and defensive value to Facebook. WhatsApp is the fastest-growing company in history in terms of users. If the company’s growth continues, and it can continue to “monetize” its users, it will be worth an enormous amount of money someday. At the same time, WhatsApp’s growth is gobbling up user messaging and connection time that once could have belonged to Facebook. Now those users and their time do belong to Facebook, which again alerts ethical issues (Blodget 2014).
The deal provides Facebook entree to new users, including teens who avoid the mainstream social networks but prefer WhatsApp and rivals, which have exploded in size as private messaging takes off (Pachal 2014).
Companies will pay Facebook $0.005 cent per message and Facebook wins a potential new WhatsApp /Facebook user and in case it will be an SMS they can charge an amount which will always be cheaper than the current price because of their volume. According to Portio Research there were 3.2bn global subscribers to SMS Marketing. When Facebook increases this market by building thrust and give user control over their permissions it can result into 200 messages per year per user. And with $0.005 a message this can result into $3.2bn a year in revenue! That’s a good return on investment and puts Facebook in a stronger position to further claim the world of permission marketing (Yiu Chu 2014).
The Term Paper on Communication Technology Essay
... of communication technology is increasing. “Facebook appears to be working on a smartphone app which will track the location of its users. (Android ... provided to contact the others through many apps such as Wechat, Line, Whatsapp and others. They could contact other without ... time, this is very useful for advertisements, conveying important messages to wide range of audiences and updating citizens of ...
3. CONCLUSION
Not all things are so bad when it comes to technology; the advance in medicine has helped mankind live a better and healthier life. All though our societies have come so far as technological advances, spiritually, our nation and the world at large is suffering from an acute Alzheimer’s disorder – that is changing the way human beings relate to one another.
Little by little, quickly growing technology from the Internet to mobile technology seems to be subtly destroying the meaningfulness of interactions we have with others, disconnecting us from the world around us, storage our personal lives on a daily basis and leading to an imminent sense of isolation in today’s society. Instead of spending time in person with friends, we just call, text or instant message them. It may seem simpler, but we ultimately end up seeing our friends face to face a lot less.
For better or worse, the new technologies are what shape our society, but it should not summarize the fabric of our morality. It is indeed a perilous time in which we live, but as responsible human beings, it is our responsibility to make this world a better place, regardless of the technology distractions and always aware of privacy importance that surround our lives.
