Privacy and Ethics Post

I rarely ever read the Terms & Conditions for any app that I use, and I’m pretty sure that many people would say the same thing. So it was interesting for me to read exactly what I’m getting myself into when I download an app on my phone. I looked at Snapchat’s User Agreement, and I never realized how much information I actually allow the app to obtain from my cell phone. There were some places they got information that had never even occurred to me before. For instance, I knew that they collected information from my contact book on my phone – this is how many people have added their friends on Snapchat. I did not realize that they obtained information on the type of phone I had,  my IP address, and data about on me from my snapchat friends.

When I think more about it, I can see the use of gathering this information. In order to become connected with people quickly through the internet, we decide that perhaps privacy is not that important if there are so many cool features being used on the app. Is it ethical? That’s questionable. I had stated earlier that people rarely read the Terms & Conditions, so it is understood that most of the time people do not know what they are getting into.  But, looking at it from a different standpoint, how else should they tell us what we are agreeing to? Is it not our own fault for not taking the time to read up on what we’re actually signing up for?  The argument of whether or not we are being informed enough straddles the fine line of ethics, and it really depends on how comfortable a person is with the way our society works.

Nowadays, hacking is a common occurrence in the interweb, and we definitely contribute enough personal information that allows us to be hacked. Are companies hacking us when they tempt us with these fancy apps? In my opinion, no.  Hackers don’t usually tell people that they are accessing your personal data, they just go out and do it. If certain businesses have been using the information for anything other than what they have said that they were going to use it for, then I would certainly classify that as hacking. Unless they’re using my information as a personal gain, I’m not too worried. (Though it’s possible I may retract this statement if I continue to read the Terms & Conditions for every website/app I sign up for.) Hacking to reveal corruption, or hacktivism as it’s coined, is perhaps a different story. I am a big believer of anti-corruption, and yet I am a realist and know that corruption happens everywhere on some level. And while it’s true that hacktivism can seem ethical sometimes, I would caution people to really know what they were getting into before hacking the system and letting the public know about it. It’s probable that their hearts are in the right place, but hacking is very ethically sketchy ground.