How Much Are Your Google Searches Worth?

As Justin Brookman says, “‘Without a framework in place to assure everyday consumers of the ability to limit the collection and retention of the minutiae of their lives by unknown third parties, any sense of a realm of personal privacy may completely evaporate’” (Tapscott 119). There should always be some sense of mystery in the world. Third party sources often find a way of getting information that Internet users did not give them express permission to. The flow of information goes further than most people realize, which is where the dangerous invasion of privacy comes in. A sharing is caring mentality is all good and fun until a third party uses it against you. We should beware the extent to which our information can spread without our

This is an important aspect of society that continues to become more and more prevalent as time goes on. This causes us to feel as if our privacy as citizens is disappearing and

Privacy is important, and something that is hard to achieve in this point in time with all of this technology. There are so many different ways to spy on

These extremely large data sets may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations relating to human behavior and interaction. These analysesaffect us on day to day basis positively and negatively and the legality of how this information is collected and the laws that apply may be unclear. Both with or without users' knowledge, consumer personal data is collected from every daily, digital activity; from purchases, web searches, amazon searches, browsing history, and phone use. This data is generated, and then downloaded and stored. [15] Companies can then use this data to create "data sets" or large files of users' data to produce customer profiling. This data can also be used by police, the governmental bodies, scientists, businesses, military, and other industries where occasional breaches of data are expected .[16] Breaches and leaks of personal information including phone calls, credit card information, home address, and personal phone numbers are examples of information that is logged and stored by these corporations while making "data sets". Much of this information is being processed and sold to marketers for the purpose of marketing their products. This information is stored digitally and in some cases, regardless of the security of the information being stored, there are risks of unauthorized parties

To apply utilitarianism to this ethical controversy one has to evaluate which option would benefit society

Utilitarianism is a type of theory that was developed to come up with a proper course of action that maximizes the joy of the stakeholders involved. While consequentialism is defined as the view that value of an action derives solely from the value of its consequences. Today, consequentialism is the form that usually takes form. Utilitarianism tries to evaluate the moral worth of an action after one has considered the actual consequences, the foreseen consequences, and the anticipated consequences. In the business environment, situations arise that require the application of utilitarianism ethics. Decision makers are placed on notice and utilitarianism takes priority over the

Issue 02: Apple is a wildly successful company that generates billions of dollars in profits every year. This is one of the strongest examples of how a company with the right strategy, great products, a strong leader and the willingness to take some risks can become vastly successful. The market in which Apple is strong has intense rivalry for market share. Apple is challenged with staying ahead of its competitors and maintaining long-term relationships with its customers. In order to stay ahead of the competition Apple is forced to keep product innovation a top priority. I would maintain a Blue Ocean Strategy to market our product and maintain our competitive advantage (McGraw-Hill Irwin, Page 152). The company has a strong and loyal customer base which will allow Apple to concentrate the focus to highlighting the features of our products. I will not focus on what our competitors can and cannot do; I will focus the attention to the benefits of having Apple products. Strategic marketing campaigns highlighting the different uses and features of the popular iPhone and iPad will headline the campaign.

In more recent years, the issue around Internet privacy is something that has been brought to everyone 's attention. In today 's society everything is based around social media and online shopping. By doing this people are making their information easily accessible for people to use. People document their whole lives on social media making it much easier for people to find information, that some may consider private, about them. When people post a picture with a location attached to it they think it 's harmless but there is a lack of privacy that is allowing people to get hold of information they don 't want out there. It has become much easier for people to get information due to the new technological advances that have been made in the recent years. Companies try to advertise to their customers through the Internet. They do this by personalizing their webpage to what they search, which violates privacy because they are tracking what customers search through cookies and data. Something as harmless as searching for baby clothes for your niece or nephew can turn in to your information being thrown out there and having these companies trying to reach you. Violation of privacy on the Internet is something we should accept because no matter what we try to do to keep our privacy people will always find a way around it. Stealing credit card information is as easy as bumping into someone. There are multiple ways people can defeat personal privacy and it is done through the use of

Pro argues this is significant in a bad way as it gives companies a large amount of power. I’m not seeing it, perhaps pro could explain why a corporation having my information gives those companies power that results in a net negative. Furthermore, pro concedes that currently companies get this information when people post personal data on networking sites. Thus, people are already equipped with a way to reasonably prevent businesses from getting their data. Of course that is by not posting their information online. No one is forced to put such information on the internet. This solution turns out to be more effective than what pro is suggesting. Ultimately it is up to people as individuals to protect their own information. We do not need a nanny state to do something for us reasonably easy to do.

Two different forms of utilitarianism are described in our text. The first is called act utilitarianism. According to Shaw and Barry, act utilitarianism states that we must ask ourselves what the consequences of a particular act in a particular situation will be for all those affected (p.60).

Personal data is quickly becoming a commodity in today's high technology world. This information is used by banks, investment and brokerage companies, credit card merchants, government agencies (local, state and federal), and consumer product-based companies. Most people probably don't realize the amount of information that's shared between companies, or how often it's done. Many companies sell and share customer data to help sell products and find out what new products they should produce. Other uses include gathering information about inventory levels to help better determine what types of products are bought at which store, when and how often. This can be used for inventory and production, to make sure that the store (or

The Utilitarian ethical theory states that what makes an action ethical or unethical are the good or bad results of the action. Actions are chosen to increase pleasure and avoid suffering and, some pleasures are better or higher than others. The theory, therefore, focuses on the outcome of a person’s actions

And with 3 billion phone calls made and 150 billion emails sent to and from the United States every day, the collection of this personal data without specifying the limits to their searches is unclear and unjust. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo among many others have recently, under protection from the Obama administration, revealed details as to the statistics of government collection. Even our nation's biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, were obliged to work with the NSA, lately disclosing information on the filtering equipment they were necessitated to use. The storage of this data for prolonged periods of time also makes these companies and their users vulnerable to security breaches such as theft and attack by hackers; for example, the cyber-security firm Trustwave discovered a server on November 24, 2013 which contained the information of over 318,000 accounts on Facebook. This breach was evidently made possible by companies storing data for an unnecessary amount of time as well as a weakened encryption standard. Both were implemented and enforced by the NSA, and the forced retention this data for over five years not only renders this metadata vulnerable to theft or misuse, but has also not been proven to be notably valuable in thwarting terrorist attacks.

The ability to see other’s pictures, comments, and other personal information, makes privacy a major issue. People no longer have private lives, because everybody post his personal information on the internet,

The utilitarian theory would approach the ethical dilemmas by a identifying the stakeholders for the situation, and the possible consequences on these stakeholders, also it requires thinking broadly for consequences and impact on the society level not only on the close circle around the dilemma (Trevino p40).