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Media Ethical Challenges in the Age of the Internet

Satisfactory Essays

Stanisha Johnson
Media Ethical Challenges in the Age of the Internet
CMM-330
Ethical Issues in Mass Media
Spring 2010
Research Paper

Over the years the internet has literally revolutionized the mass media industry and, in the process one of the most affected areas by the internet is in the area of compliance with media ethical standards. These ethical problems are invasion of privacy, inaccuracy, and copy right infringement. One of the biggest ethical problems is privacy rights over the internet. Internet privacy is defined as the desire of personal privacy with respect to transactions or transmission of data via the internet. It involves the exercise of control over the type or amount of information that persons reveal about …show more content…

It is the user 's prerogative to apply such settings when providing personal information on the internet (Pfaffenberger pg.66) The process of profiling (also known as "tracking") assembles and analyzes several events, each attributable to a single originating entity, in order to gain information (especially patterns of activity) relating to the originating entity (wikipedia.com). Some organizations engage in the profiling of people 's web browsing, collecting the URLs of sites visited. The resulting profiles can potentially link with information that personally identifies the individual who did the browsing. Some web-oriented marketing-research organizations may use this practice legitimately, for example: in order to construct profiles of 'typical Internet users '. Such profiles, which describe average trends of large groups of Internet users rather than of actual individuals, can then prove useful for market analysis. Although the aggregate data does not constitute a privacy violation, some people believe that the initial profiling does. Profiling becomes a more contentious privacy issue when data-matching associates the profile of an individual with personally-identifiable information of the individual (Wikipedia.com). Governments and organizations may set up honeypot websites -featuring controversial topics – with the purpose of attracting and tracking unwary people (wikipedia.com). This constitutes a potential danger

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