Pretend your company is considering selling customer data gained through their Facebook page to a 3rd party as a way to increase revenue. However, the company has a written commitment to privacy on its Facebook page that reads:
"We will not sell your personal information to anyone, for any purpose. Period."
Consider Hooker's ethical tests (or another reputable ethical framework that you uncover in your research) as you create a well-organized paper that addresses the situation above. In your paper, answer the following questions:
- What other information or reference points would help you to make an appropriate appraisal of the ethical nature of the situation?
- Would the company be in ethical violation of the policy if the data was aggregated, stripped of personal data, and then legally sold?
- What if the company did not actually sell the data but instead shared (allowed use of) it in exchange for a service such as mining of that data?
- What if one of the company's other social media sites omitted a mention of data sharing in its privacy policy and there is a single login for all company sites and the data among them was shared with corporate headquarters? Could that information ethically be sold?
- If leadership decided to change their policy, what data would it be ethically responsible in sharing?