Analysis of Ethical Issues in Software Development among World Technology Giants 

Analysis of Ethical Issues in Software Development among World Technology Giants

Introduction

We are currently living in an era where economic, political and social activities are information-based. In other words, they were said to be living within the information age or age of informationalization. This has resulted from the consistent development and technological use characterized by a constant rise in the number of knowledge workers. This era has led to a more open environment in the sense of communication and internationalization. The world has thus become a global village and there is a trans-border exchange of information. Despite the many advantages of technological developments, the paradigm shift results in a new set of issues revolving around ethics, legal rights and privacy issues. The latter is a matter of concern especially owing to the fact that there is the threat posed by an emphasis on free information flow. In addition, cases have arisen of matters of protection of the economic investment of owners where intellectual property rights are violated.

Ethics refers to what is right or wrong. The actions that are good or bad are relative as per specific situations. Ethics shapes human behavior, enabling them to behave while attaining the fundamental goods that make us ethical humans. On the other hand, privacy refers to the human condition in life that is characterized by excluding oneself from the public eye. Privacy results stem from the right to be left alone and thus protected under private law. To all software development companies and generally the technology industry, the obligation to respect a person’s privacy is ethical and a prima facie duty. However, this does not entirely mean that it is an absolute duty without room for exceptions.

Case One:  Samsung Case Study

Samsung is an electronics seller making entry into the electronics industry in the late 1960s. As a business strategy, the firm divided itself into several electronic-related divisions including Samsung Electronics Devices, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Samsung Corning as well as Samsung Semiconductor and Telecommunications.  In April 2013, the company found itself in a significant ethical problem where its Taiwan branch company paid people to write and give incorrect and negative reviews about a competitor’s product. Samsung Taiwan had hired a lot of people, especially students, to perpetrate the plan. They were requiring writing and publishing misleading reviews about the competitor’s products, thus making Samsung Taiwan gain a competitive advantage over its rivals. In addition, Samsung hired at least two third-party marketing companies to carry out the activities of posting negative reviews about its competitors. In defence, Samsung claimed the actions were justified as part of their marketing strategy. As revealed, HTC, a global electronic seller, was the victim and further investigation revealed that the company received negative comments about its products while Samsung, on the other hand, had positive evaluations about its products.

Astroturfing is the marketing strategy adopted by Samsung as it is commonly referred to in the industry. It is the masking of the beneficiary of a message for political, advertising or public relations advantages where the message is meant to make it appear as though it originates from and supported by the people on the ground (Henrie & Gilde, 2019). In the particular year, the firm is found to be guilty on two instances, although it is not necessarily the first company to be caught in such acts.

Samsung’s marketing strategy is somewhat unethical by its standards. The company is guilty of playing dirty with the motives to gather immense support from consumers and ward off competition from other companies (Selinger, 2018). Samsung’s ethical concerns, as outlined in this case, present a corporate issue. In return, the corporate issue raises ethical questions about the specific organization (Werner, 2017). These questions cut across the organizational morality in its activities, policies and organizational structure of the entire company.

The ethical analysis highlights the need to value competition as a way of doing better business. Thus, Samsung Taiwan should have considered more fair marketing strategies as opposed to playing dirty. There is no respect for conducting dirty business. Samsung should consider monitoring the actions of their employees or affiliate partners or divisions to avoid the practice of involving the company in unethical business practices. Besides, as it aims to better the lives of its consumers, Samsung has a responsibility to allow fair competition among firms in the industry.

Case Two: Facebook Violation of Privacy

Australia’s consumer watchdog has made recommendations of mayor changes in the laws relating to consumer protection and privacy. This is in the wake of the violation of protective and privacy rights by Facebook in the current period. In their brie, the watchdog proposes that the reforms are adopted, the consumers will be at an advantage in their daily dealings with companies such as Google, Facebook and others. As part of their report, ACCC indicates that consumers have increased concerns about their ways of tracking and disclosing personal information to third parties. Besides, despite these companies having privacy policies and contracts, they are impossible to understand and thus leave the consumers with no alternatives than to accept them. Companies such as Facebook have been accused of trading personal data with incentives to hide their real practices (Ebert, 2019). As a consequence, they have vast data quantities about customers aiding them to preserve their market power, cause harm to consumers and make competitors lose for failure to compete on improved policies.

Facebook can track customer information online once logged in or even when they are non-users. However, the moral issue arises as most consumers are oblivious of this fact as they continue to use the social media platform. In the latest scandal, Facebook was charged with allowing data of up to 85 million account holders to be harvested by a data analytics company (Child & Starcher, 2016). In 2016, Cambridge Analytica had access to personal information from Facebook users, thus violating the privacy of its users. The Federal Trade Commission, FTC considered slapping Facebook with a fine of up to ten billion dollars a move that the defendant’s lawyers considered unconstitutional and beyond the law. In seeking leniency, the company’s lawyers argued that the company failed to benefit from the violation of consumer privacy and that consumers did not suffer personal injury as a result.

In reiteration, privacy experts argued that personal information was used to profile individuals based on their political preferences. The ethical issue arises from the illegal acquisition of personal information without the due regard or harm caused to consumers, which is relatively impossible to quantify. In Facebook’s privacy violation case, the acquired data is said to have influenced voters in the concluded presidential election (Öhman & Aggarwal, 2019). The ethical concerns revolving around Facebook led to references of prior similar instances for example, in 2015, where  Ashley Madison’s website facilitated affairs or married couples leading to hackers leaking personal information including full names and personal email addresses of more than 36 million users of the service. Facebook was fined $5 billion which was subsequently settled.

A fundamental question is asked as of what is allowed under Facebook’s privacy policy setting currently and whether such permission granted is broad enough to allow for subsequent violations. In an insight, hundreds of software developers making dating, gaming and political apps used Facebook to access huge data files about users and their friends.

Case Three:  Apple’s Talent Poaching from Competition

Apple is among the largest electronics manufacturers and sellers in the world. However, the company has come in the limelight, not because of inventions or hitting milestones in cash reserves or profits but with news of the company secretly working on a new project aimed at building an autonomous electric vehicle. This means that the company is directly aiming to compete with Silicon Valley competitors, Google and Tesla, in the established automobile industry. Reports confirm that Apple has been seen to poach top talent from traditional car manufacturers and suppliers. Besides, the company has been sued by EV battery makers A123 Systems for allegedly wooing several engineers to facilitate Apple’s project.

As reports emerged, Steve Zadesky, an instrumental figure in iPod and iPhone development, is the one spearheading the project. Allegedly, he is a former employee at Ford as an engineer. Although this particular case seems an ancient history, currently, the firm is said to acquire several employees with top credentials in the automobile industry. Elton Musk, Tesla Motors founder, proves that Silicon Valley’s stalwart Apple Inc. has promised to offer Tesla’s employees a whopping $250,000 in bonuses for their shift to Apple with 60-percent pay increases (Roberts, 2015).The allegations of employee poaching among Silicon Valley’s giants resulted in suppressed engineers’ wages leading to a drawn-out-o court tussle over the compensation to be awarded to employees as well the legal fees collectable from the compensation amount (Turkus, 2015).

The U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh assigned to a deal where Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe were jointly expected to compensate the defendants (Roberts, 2015). Although employee poaching is not an uncommon practice among Silicon Valley companies with aims of wooing employees away from competition, the practice is fundamentally damaging to the auto industry(Shy & Stenbacka, 2015). Ethically, the practice may seem favourable to the poaching firm but detrimental to the losing firm. It is prudent to acquire and consistently attract top talent, but it does not necessarily have to be at the expense of a competitor firm. Players in the auto industry are noted to claim that their biggest challenge is finding and retaining top talent.

Conclusion

Ethical value is important in doing business. It creates less friction among players and evens out the ground for fairness in furtherance of business. Therefore, it is important that firms consider more ethical ways of marketing, recruitment and handling consumer information without infringing on the rights and freedoms of others. As a guiding principle, companies should consider taking actions that will benefit a lot more people as compared to only themselves.  In addition, practices that result in a better business environment and greater benefits to society should be encouraged. On the contrary, victims of ethical malpractices tend to suffer the brunt of lost business opportunities, lost top talent or basically a violation of certain rights and in result, could be triggered to act in some particular manner.  Such actions could be legal redress seeking compensation or contractual agreement that may subsequently affect the industry.

References

Child, J., & Starcher, S. (2016). Fuzzy Facebook privacy boundaries: Exploring mediated lurking, vague-booking, and Facebook privacy management. Computers In Human Behavior, 54, 483-490. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.035

Ebert, I. (2019). The Tech Company Dilemma. Ethical Managerial Practice in Dealing with Government Data Requests. Zeitschrift Für Wirtschafts- Und Unternehmensethik, 20(2), 264-275. doi: 10.5771/1439-880x-2019-2-264

Henrie, K., & Gilde, C. (2019). An Examination of the Impact of Astroturfing on Nationalism: A Persuasion Knowledge Perspective. Social Sciences, 8(2). doi: 10.3390/socsci8020038

Martin, K., Shilton, K., & Smith, J. (2019). Business and the Ethical Implications of Technology: Introduction to the Symposium. Journal Of Business Ethics, 160(2), 307-317. doi: 10.1007/s10551-019-04213-9

Öhman, C., & Aggarwal, N. (2019). What if Facebook Goes Down? Ethical and Legal Considerations for the Demise of Big Tech Platforms. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3494144

Roberts, J. (2015). Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe will pay $415 million in anti-poach deal. Retrieved 4 March 2020, from https://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

Selinger, E. (2018). Will Tech Companies Ever Take Ethics Seriously?. Retrieved 4 March 2020, from https://medium.com/s/story/will-tech-companies-ever-take-ethics-seriously-35d991f9f839

Shy, O., & Stenbacka, R. (2015). Talent Competition, Labor Mobility, and Anti-Poaching Agreements. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2568943

Turkus, B. (2015). Autoblog is now a part of Verizon Media. Retrieved 4 March 2020, from https://www.autoblog.com/2015/02/07/elon-musk-apple-hiring-tesla-workers/

Werner, P. (2017). A Posteriori Ethical Intuitionism and the Problem of Cognitive Penetrability. European Journal Of Philosophy, 25(4), 1791-1809. doi: 10.1111/ejop.12272