Brand Trust and Public Opinion

I decided to look through the Terms and Conditions on Spotify, but as they revealed very little of interest to me I looked through the Privacy Policy as well. Unexpectedly, the reassuring and less aggressively legalistic wording of the Privacy Policy in comparison to the Terms and Conditions actually made me trust the app slightly more. They clearly state that they collect registration data, usage data, and device data, but they make sure to say that while you can grant the app access to photos and camera, location, microphone, and contacts, they will never collect this information without express consent. They also include a section which explains why they might want to collect this data and what’d they do with it, such as provide it to advertisers and provide certain features in the app. Concerning the question of ethics, all of this seems in the realm of what you’d expect an app to utilize and I would not consider this hacking.

Now, there could certainly be something in between the lines of these statements or it could be intentionally misleading, but I think the wording of the policy shows that these apps are very aware of their consumer’s anxiety about their data being collected and used without their knowledge and the intent is to set the user at ease. After all, brand trust is an important commodity for today’s businesses. 

However, if the app’s policy is misleading and it is abusing powers that it is not making explicitly clear to the user, then I think it would be the civic duty of whoever was aware to reveal this corruption. That being said, Edward Snowden revealed the incredibly concerning policies of the NSA and still very little has changed; I don’t think he saw the anger he was expecting from the populace. I think Edward Snowden was doing his civic duty, but I wonder if he still thinks it was worth it as he remains forever exiled from his home.
Concerning the ethics of the Panama Papers, it is hard to definitely say something is ethical considering that there are many ethical frameworks, so I will merely say that I personally think it is acceptable to hack huge corrupt businesses like this in order to reveal all the ways that it is breaking the law. However, it’s a bit tricky to put people on trial with stolen information; I think it would be wrong for the police to steal my information and use it against me, so it doesn’t seem right to do this on a bigger scale either. Still, I think it is important to reveal corruption, so that it will at least be persecuted in public opinion. I’m very interested to see the effects of the Panama Papers in the coming months.