What are some ethical issues that the industry faces?

Blog Response, Jan 24^th

Business 1.0 Alberto Annunziata

What are some ethical issues that the industry faces?

The industry that I will take in consideration when answering this question will be the IT market, more specifically one of the biggest firm in the market, the Apple company.

For many years now, Apple has been making us happy with a big variety of products and servicies such as computers, ITunes, the online Apple Store and the recently introduced social network called Ping, which functions like facebook but instead of sharing pictures and videos, you will be more likely to share songs and/or artists that you know and love.

In our generation, all of these services such as computers and social networks have become a necessity for us. Since the prices of the IT department are really high, not all of the people can afford such things. One of the ethical issues that the IT industries such as Apple or Microsoft may encounter is the price fixing of the goods and services. Is it ethically correct to put such a high price on something that nowadays we need?

I personally think that the IT department should really try and work out different ways on how they could reduce the prices of the different goods and services that in today’s society have become a need in our everyday life.

What are some examples of ethics challenges that industry players have experienced?

Over the past years, in the IT department there have been many complaints of misuse of privacy, in other words, people use services such as hotmail, Google, Skype or facebook in order to make fake profiles in order to appear as another individual rather than themselves.

In the recent years, a 40 year-old man purposely created a fake facebook profile where he stated to be a 17 year-old student from London so that he could get together with a girl. After a few weeks, this man managed to convince the girl to meet up face to face. Once they did, the man kidnapped the girl and killed her after he had sexually abused of her. This happened in United Kingdom around the year 2008.

This scandal rose many ethical issues against the IT market saying that the privacy was not that secure and that people continuously and purposely misused the different services the IT market has to offer, in this case facebook.

After that extremely sad episode that took place in UK, the IT department stated that they were going to try and make the privacy for the different services more secure and they also ran a campaign to warn younger generation how to securely set up an account with the right privacy settings so that things like this would not happen again.