Description
Using facial recognition, social engineering, voice recognition, location tracking, website tracking, purchasing habits, and personal videos, images, conversations, text messages, etc. can be considered acceptable or unacceptable in certain situations. Present an ethical argument supporting or refuting the acceptability of using data or information from one of the aforementioned areas. The argument must identify, define, and use the terms, principles, and concepts of at least one ethical approach (e.g. teleology, deontology, virtue).
Remember to support your statements with factual information (i.e., attribution/citations). In addition, material from the course textbook or the textbook's author(s) cannot comprise more than 25% of the sourced and/or quoted material.
The paper must following the formatting guidelines in The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020), (7th ed.), and contain a title page, five scholarly references, three to five pages of content, and a reference page. In addition, the paper will be submitted through the Turnitin originality-checking tool.
Explanation & Answer
Attached. Please let me know if you have any questions or need revisions.
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Website Tracking
Student's Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Code & Name
Instructor's Name
Due Date
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Website Tracking
Introduction
Technological innovations have become pervasive and ubiquitous in 21st-century
societies. Business enterprises have taken the cue and embraced technology to conduct their
business operations to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors. To gain insights into
the user's behaviors and interests, organizations can track websites to identify how they interact.
The information which can be tracked by the websites includes the IP addresses of the users,
their device characteristics, their demographics, private information, including credit card
numbers, browsing history, and the customer's passwords.
The e-commerce retail giant Amazon's "Go" algorithms or BingoBox developed by the
Chinese track their website visitors' facial expressions and movements in a bid to offer a
personalized shopping experience to each customer (Seele et al., 2019, p. 6). The information
collected by these organizations creates unintended ethical quandaries that must be navigated
carefully. This paper seeks to argue that although website tracking has its merits, the use of the
website tracking data can be unacceptable in certain circumstances.
Unacceptable/Unethical Website Tracking behavior
Access to Third Party
Data collected from the website should not be granted to third parties without the
information owners' consent. In this regard, the organization storing the collected confidential
data from users can divulge private data, shopping habits, or even the complete customer profile.
The General Data Protection Regulation prohibits organizations from giving third parties access
to customers' data without the information owners' consent (Dove, 2019, p. 1013-1030). In this
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regard, organizations are taken as the custodians of data they collect from their customers, and
third parties should not get access to the data. However, organizations face selling the users' data
with monetary motivations and the consequences with which their actions come. Giving user's
data to third parties can constitute legal challenges and loss of brand equity. Therefore,
organizations should make the ethical decision to be concerned about their customer's interests
and financial interests.
Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Additionally, it is unethical to use private data that the organizations have collected from
website tracking in targeted advertising. Organizations like e-commerce sites and medial social
platforms collect a significant amount of data from their users. The data collected might include
sensitive information like passwords, physical addresses, and the customer's browsing history.
The internet search history can reveal private information to the organizations. The business
enterprise then uses big data analytics to process customers' private data to gain patterns and
insights.
In some cases, the organizations can be driven by greed and opt to use their private data
for targeted marketing campaigns. A study done by the University of Johannesburg, South
Africa, found that consumers were worried about perceived privacy control of their private data
and desire for privacy generated from targeted marketing (Mpinganjira & Maduku, 2019, p. 464478). Therefore, organizations should have better ethical decision-making f...
