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Ashley Frank Case

Decent Essays

This case study addresses the issue of a group of hackers that calls themselves “the impact team.” The group disagreed with the website Ashley Madison and hacked into their system and retrieved private information. Ashley Madison was a website that charged individuals money to engage in extramarital affairs. The impact team had contacted the people behind Ashley Madison, Avid Life Media and informed them that they were expected to shut down their website and that they would have thirty days to do so. However, the website was not taken down, and the impact team released customers’ information from the website. Personal information including names, credit card numbers, addresses, fees paid on the website and initial sign up dates was released …show more content…

Many consequences that occurred out of this hack can support the idea that the impact team were morally wrong in revealing the personal information of people on the website. First, the Ashley Madison customers were put into a situation in which most of their personal information was revealed. Members of the military, government and other higher positions were also revealed to be participating on the website. This release of information caused suicides and harmed relationships and families of those members who were found to be participating in and paying for Ashley Madison’s service. This hack also caused many individuals’ reputations to be destroyed as a result of the leaked information. Therefore, the members of the company, Avid Life Media, customers of Ashley Madison and families and friends all seemed to be affected by this hack. Moreover, the principle of utility introduces the idea that the Ashley Madison hackers were morally wrong in revealing the customers’ personal information because their actions created many negative consequences of the group of people involved. Moreover, the principle of utility states that the consequences for an action will determine whether something is to be viewed as morally good or bad and since the hackers brought about many consequences for so many people involved, their actions are not morally …show more content…

With this, individuals should be treated equally. According to Kant’s categorical imperative, the impact team was morally wrong because they released information to the public in order to shut down Ashley Madison. In their opinion, the impact team felt that a company should not profit from people paying to have extramarital affairs. With this view, the hackers dumped the customers’ personal information in order to follow through with the threat that was made to Avid Life Media to release personal information. Although the impact team achieved their goal in having Ashley Madison shut down, they did something morally wrong in relation to Kant’s categorical imperative by using the customers and their personal information as a weapon to achieve their goal of having the website shut

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