As technology progresses, many new concerns regarding computer ethics emerge; I'd like to talk about privacy problems. We are in a society where it is simple to find practically anyone's information on the internet. We use anything from social networking to shopping websites, where we create an account and sometimes forget about it. The majority of consumers know that the websites they trust with their personal information sell their data to third parties. Data brokers collect our information from our online visits via cookies, social media, and cellphone tracking to sell the information they find from individual people. For example, we are getting all these junk or spam emails from companies we never gave our email to or had an account with them. These companies utilize the information they obtained from data brokers to target their products or services through advertisements specifically. It is evident as many people notice that more and more ads targeted explicitly towards them pop up on their social media. Apps like TikTok and Instagram have collected data on what we like and don't want to adapt to our FYP (For you page) and Explore pages. The amount of time we spend viewing a post or liking certain pages help companies collect data to personalize advertisements to our preferences. I also believe location-based advertising is an invasion of our privacy. I'm sure that not many people like the idea of our IP address being on the internet; although the IP address help with looking for services or products near us, it is being exposed regardless of our opinion. Companies are not transparent about what they are doing with our data. Therefore, we don't even know how much of our personal information is out there. Is it ethical for firms to utilize customers' data and do whatever they want even when they know the consumers have no option but to accept the terms and conditions to use the products or services? In the computer world, it appears that agreeing to the terms and conditions without them is the norm. https://financialpost.com/technology/data-brokers-are-tracking-you-and-selling-theinfo#:~:text=Data%20brokers%20%2C%20companies%20that%20collect,selling%20everything% 20about%20individual%20people.
